Croquet (Re: [sldev] [AWG] Comments on SLGOGP Draft 1)

[Lawson English]

Argent Stonecutter wrote:
>> There are other groups and organizations where Second Life isn't the 
>> central focus which may be more what you are looking for in that 
>> regard, such as Croquet/Qwak, Wonderland and so on, though of course, 
>> each of them is more closed in some ways than Second Life is expected 
>> to become.
>
> Croquet in particular is a fascinating design, one that I'm still 
> working to understand. It seems to require complete trust from all 
> parties since it seems to distribute arbitrary Squeak code to all the 
> viewers. I'm not sure how it avoids erroneous messages being 
> inadvertently reinjected with inconsistent timestamps by a single 
> instance of croquet code, except by careful coding of the objects 
> themselves.

All objects in Croquet are of class TObject which takes care of all this 
stuff at that level, so unless TObject is buggy, that shouldn't be an issue.

>
> I don't think there's any intent that Croquet work in an insecure 
> environment.
>
There is a hack solution for it (perhaps it is more mature now) where 
certain data/objects can be kept private to a given client, but when I 
was looking at trying to integrate SL group IM with Croquet, the best 
solution seemed to be to keep IM completely out of the Croquet world. 
That seemed to be the suggestion for normal Croquet users as well: if 
you needed to hold a private IM session, code it outside the Croquet 
environment.

I gave up on the project when I learned that using Croquet on a Mac over 
the internet made it almost impossible to link up with another Croquet 
user. The few times we managed to, it tended to freeze/crash within a 
few seconds. I'm sure things have improved in the past 7 months but 
don't know how much.


> In any case, the way it's tied to a particular Smalltalk 
> implementation seems to rule out it becoming an open system, but the 
> distributed simulation model is well worth studying and learning from. 
> It's really fascinating, and I recommend everyone here read the papers 
> at least.
>

There's an active Croquet developers list also thought not nearly as 
active as the Squeak list itself.


Lawson