[sldev] [META][AWG]log chat of AWG meeting Friday, Oct 5, 2007

[Callum Lerwick]

On Sat, 2007-10-06 at 12:15 -0400, Zha Ewry wrote:
> Unless I miss the mark badly, the intent is that any asset which can
> be used by a service (ie has a public appearance) will have a URL
> form.This should allow complete disambiguation as to which asset
> server holds each asset.  With REST and the overall web approach, when
> we want to know the extrinsic properties of an asset, a properly
> formed query against the URL should/could result in the properties
> being returned. In general, looking towards existing REST style web
> resource patterns is the goal here. 

"Almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

The way I see the internet moving as a whole, is being a giant
distributed cache. We need to stop caring about where an asset is
stored, and be more concerned with the identity of the asset. The asset
could very well be stored in thousands of places across the internet,
both large and small. For this to happen, we need a way to unambiguously
identify an asset, completely independent of its location. A content
hash is probably the best way to do this. Duplicate copies of an asset
become obvious to identify, and likewise maliciously modified or
corrupted copies of the asset can be identified and culled.

You then need a process with which to take an asset hash and find a
location from which to request a full copy. DNS is one example of this
kind of process. You take an identifier like secondlife.com and resolve
it to a physical location, an IP address. Note that it can easily
resolve to *multiple* IP addresses. A distributed system like Kademlia
is another route to take. Or you can just ask Google. Or all three.

Note that this all can nicely coexist, abstracted behind URLs.

You can have assets on the web as it exists today:

http://foo.com/bar/baz/lolcat.j2k

Or do something like this:

findassetprotocol://3d2b5bf415880e67f5c2aecccdc238f4c5dbf5a1

Which may very well resolve to a referral to the above URL. Or resolve
to a torrent. Or resolve to a locally cached copy. Or resolve to an
asset that currently only exists locally. Local asset storage is not
hard problem, people.

Or even:

http://assetgateway.secondlife.com/3d2b5bf415880e67f5c2aecccdc238f4c5dbf5a1

And even:

http://legacyassets.secondlife.com/a996abeb-fe86-0e45-8740-a8be3a8b8178

Something to keep in mind:

http://online-desktop.org/wiki/Online_Desktop
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