[sldev] Certified HTTP Project Update

[Ryan Williams (Which)]

An introduction: Certified HTTP is a way to do exactly-once, guaranteed 
message delivery over HTTP in a RESTful way.  In short it is retries 
coupled with some rules about when to save state.  It's fairly 
well-documented for something that has no implementation yet:
   > http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Certified_HTTP
   > http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Certified_HTTP_API
   > http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Certified_HTTP_Project
   > http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Certified_HTTP_Escrow
The major goal of the project is to simply produce a Python 
implementation in collaboration with the community.  I'm hoping that 
weekly project updates will keep you all up to speed on the progress of 
the project.

We've spent this week coding up test cases, documentation, and tinkering
with the back-end code that will be necessary before deploying Certified 
HTTP.

We are also putting some effort into the partnership announced in this 
press release:
   > http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22428.wss
Hopefully we'll have more news regarding that soon.

I've written a fault injector that makes it possible to simulate many
types of crashes in a straightforward unit test.  Sardonyx has cleaned
up eventlet.httpc and added some tests while further building out the 
unit tests for chttp.

Sue has moved our JIRA tasks to the newly-created CHTTP PJIRA project,
so we can be transparent about our progress there.  See
   > https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/CHTTP-1

Setup instructions and an overview of the project are here:
   > http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Certified_HTTP_Project

Sardonyx made some decisions about how to handle status codes, and the
result is here:
   > http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Certified_HTTP#Status_Codes

I finally cranked out failure diagrams, and stuck them all here:
   > http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Certified_HTTP_Failure_Diagrams

Still the largest question in everyone's mind is "what is this useful
for?".  We currently have one example application (the escrow); at some
point we all need to sit down and figure out how and where else 
Certified HTTP
fits into all the future architecture plans that we have.

Also, don't forget about my office hours:
Thursdays @ 11 AM - 12 PM
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Beaumont/165/52/40?title=Which%20Land

-RYaN