[sldev] Certified HTTP Project Update Nov 8

[Ryan Williams (Which)]

On the Non-Coding Front:

Chet Murthy, an IBM employee, is officially joining the Certified HTTP
project.  We've been talking about this project with folks at IBM for a
while, and it's great to finally see the wheels of lawyerin' turn so
that we can develop code together!

As with all things, proportional to the amount of effort that went into
the legal side of things, the effect on the project and the code are
small.  It'll still be open-source, the documentation is still under
construction, and we'll still be accepting contributions from those with
contributor agreements.  IBM has experience participating in open source
projects, y'see.

The newness that results from the collaboration with IBM is simply this:
  - Chet will be joining the project.  He's an experienced distributed
systems developer at IBM. I'll hassle him to send an intro email.
  - So far, the project's code has been under the MIT license, but both
companies agreed that the Apache Public License v2 made more sense, so
we'll be switching over to that.
  - IBM and Linden Lab will jointly own the copyright on code we develop
together.  This won't affect anyone other than us, so just FYI.

That's it!  Glad to have IBM on the team in for such an important part
of grid interoperability!

On the Coding Front:

Sardonyx has largely completed his refactoring of eventlet.httpc. The
major improvement is the ability to handle retries, either automatically
for redirects or semi-automatically for various other status codes.
I've written a series of unit tests that plumb many possible
combinations of failures in conversations betwee server and client.
Though the tests take many hours to run (gotta fix that), they haven't
yet failed.

Next, Chet and I will tackle garbage collection and a mysql persistence
layer.

-RYaN