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

Zha Ewry zha.ewry at gmail.com
Sun Oct 7 23:36:46 PDT 2007


Ok.. I need to get this to the wiki as well, but here goes.

Lets think of two things. There's a broad eco system, full of servers, and
services and clients and avatars, and tools. It's broader than the
architecture that defines it. In particular, there are many concepts and
nameable things which span the eco-system. In the center the architecture
defines a very crisp set of things. Namely how the parts, defined largely as
web services, interact, through a series of well defined web service
contracts, some data formats, and some patterns how the calls should be
assembled.

This is where I get very pedantic.The architecture talks about the things
which happen across the web services, between the various services and
clients and the formats and such. The architecture cannot say a thing about
what happens anywhere else. In the eco-system, spanning down to tools and
internals, we will have many lovely concepts, such as nameable things which
will soon be an asset. But.. things inside the guts of the client, and the
servers themselves are not the things the architecture  refers to. So.. An
asset, even tho it is clearly still an asset, in some sense, inside the
client, or inside a server.. is only, definable, in the context of how it is
expressed in architectural
space.

If we accept, the notion that Zero, Which, and the Linden team is proposing,
that this is deeply a web services, web style architecture, what that means,
is, that an asset, as a term of architecture, only refers to the web
addressable notion of the broader concept. The clients, and servers will, of
course have lovely local objects, which happen to be the inside the
component manifestation of the asset, but, they won't, in a formal sense, be
the asset.

If.. in order to make this make sense to people, one needs to define terms
such as  "asset" in the eco-system and terms "hosted_asset" or some such, in
the architecture, that's fine. But.. We have to be crystal clear that there
are two different things here. One is the addressable thing that I can refer
to in an architectural sense, the other is the much broader, more informal
sense of things which are clustered around the architectural idea. But, as
they reside inside components, inside clients, without any way of being
touched by architectural components, they aren't the same as the narrow
term.

Why get so pedantic? Because, we need to be able to say "We store the asset,
in the asset server, and we pass it to other components, via a URL when
passing by reference, and as a structured chunk of LLSD, when passing a copy
down to the internal components of a server or client. And we need to
distinguish between the copied hunk of state, and the web addressable item
which gives us a copy of that state.

- Zha





On 10/8/07, Lawson English <lenglish5 at cox.net> wrote:
>
> Callum Lerwick wrote:
> > On Sun, 2007-10-07 at 16:44 -0700, Lawson English wrote:
> >
> >> I believe  there can and likely SHOULD BE plenty of data  associated
> >> with the client that doesn't live in an external asset server. If "not
> >> an asset" is defined as being "'unpublished' to the external world,"
> >> where "external" includes 1-person sims, then plenty of data that the
> >> client might display will never be an asset or even a "proto-asset."
> >>
> >
> > You're really overthinking this. If I used the word "file" instead of
> > asset would that make things any clearer? ;P
> >
> > Everything is a file, and every file is an asset. There are no
> > "proto-assets". No "non-assets". Its all assets.
> >
> > And I'm getting sleepy and possibly incoherent. :)
> >
> Zha and I went around with this issue. I'm on the fence as far as
> terminology, but I DO agree with her that there is a dichotomy between
> stuff that lives on the server side and stuff that lives only on the
> client side (without any server knowing about it).
>
> Call it published vs unpublished assets, or assets vs non-assets, but
> there is an important architectural distinction, from the perspective of
> the client-server communication level, which is her concern in the AWG.
>
> I'll let her clarify her position beyond that.
>
> L
>
>
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