[sldev] Certified HTTP (and Escrow!) Project Update Dec 12

[Ryan Williams (Which)]

Last week I declared that Certified HTTP would be done enough to start
working on The Escrow, and it was!

Here are some of the things we did for The Escrow in this past week:
  - Talked through some more use cases and decided that there were few
enough exceptions to the "shuffle" model that we should go ahead with it.
  - Wrote up the first working version of the escrow, which even at this
early stage succeeds in the face of multiple failures of every party in
the transaction.
  - Wrote some sample escrow plugin resources: NoCopyObject and "Vics"
(valueless inworld currency, get it?).

This doesn't mean that development on Certified HTTP has stopped, quite
the contrary in fact, as we've accomplished these tasks in the past week:
  - Fixed a rather tricky bug in saranwrap.py that was interfering with
our database adapter.  It turns out that even cooperatively-yielding
coroutines can sometimes violate assumptions of sequentiality.
  - Added the beginnings of a monitoring/failure analysis framework that
will eventually allow an operator to debug and undo failed transactions
via a web application.

In the coming week I'm expecting us to do a code cleanup pass, hew even
more closely to the Certified HTTP spec in terms of client/server
behavior, add Escrow tests that make many simultaneous transactions,
give even more life to the monitoring infrastructure, and and add a few
more example plugins so that we can do more interesting transactions.

I'll be out on vacation starting the 19th, and I'll see you all back
again on the 31st.

-RYaN