[sldev] Open Grid Identifier Notation draft proposal

[Cenji Neutra]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 12:04 PM, Jason Giglio <gigstaggart at gmail.com> wrote:
>> confused with DNS domain names.  For example, "com.secondlife.agni"
>> could be the identifier for the SL main grid.

> Why?  What's the point in reversing them?

The idea was to avoid confusion with domain names.

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 12:12 PM, JB Kraft <kwerks.sl at gmail.com> wrote:
> Excellent notion. Is this discussion to take place here or elsewhere?

I guess it is related to SL development.  There is also a
Discussion/Talk page were comments can be posted.

> Has the notion of a prefix or transport been discussed rather then a name
> reversal? Is is not clear to me the benefit of the name reversal.

No, it hasn't.   This is the kind of feedback we were after :)

> Given the convention of the prefix 'www' indicating the world wide web, and
> in the spirit of that naming convention attempting to look forward to other
> network notions, has a prefix of 'grid' or 'mv' (metaverse) or something
> like that been considered?
>
> 'grid.angi.secondlife.com' or 'mv.agni.secondlife.com'
>
> or even more simply the transport mechanism?
>
> 'grid://agni.secondlife.com' or 'mv://agni.secondlife.com'
>
> It seems to me that the current push to utilize HTTP for services, the
> plethora of software that understands this domain ordering and the ability
> to capitalize on existing DNS services would make this much easier then
> re-writing those things to accomodate this convention.

The intention was to keep the abstract identifiers independent from
any service end-points or resource locators.
While a scheme like that may be useful as a standard way to connect to
a service implementing a known
interface, we're after a more abstract way to refer to them without
any implication as to where the service
might be located or what APIs it might support.
Obviously, there is a need for a way to get to a service end-point
from an identifier, but we don't want to
dictate that at this stage.

To give an example of how you might achieve something like that.
Consider a hypothetical standard that specifies how
an identifier can be used to obtain a service end-point in the following way:
- map the identifier to a DNS host name by reversing the components
and then appending a standard 'root' domain, such as virtualworld.id,
for example to yield "agni.secondlife.com.virtualworld.id".
- perform a DNS lookup on that domain for the SRV record
- perhaps the SVC record can provide an SLGOGP login URL directly for
an agent domain, or perhaps the host is identifies is required to
support a simple rest GET request that returns some standard piece of
XML that includes information such as login URLs and the like.

Just one possibility of many and something that is outside of the
scope of just specifying an identifier notation.

-Cenji.