[sldev] Suggestion for viewer plug-ins

[Lawson English]

Edward Artaud wrote:
> I've documented my thinking about the requirements for a viewer 
> plug-in model in a Jira entry:
>
> http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7970
>
> There are some discussions of plug-ins in the wiki 
> (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Plugin_architecture), however, I 
> don't think they fully convey the importance of this capability for 
> the evolution of the platform or mention the requirement for plug-ins 
> to actually participate in the rendering pipeline.  I'm increasingly 
> becoming convinced that in order for SL to be a viable platform for 
> professional content, that such a plug-in model will be required if 
> for no other reason than for third-parties to be implement the content 
> protection and access to secure assets they need outside of the 
> open-source codebase.

My own belief is that a plug-in architecture won't make sense until the 
OGP is much, MUCH further along. The current protocols and set of 
libraries is just too convoluted and organic to allow a viable plugin 
system to be designed. By the time ti could go "live" in any meaningful 
way, the underlying architecture will have changed too drastically for 
any plug-in that was designed for the current system to still be usable.

If you want to experiment with plugin designs for SL, join the pyogp 
crew and steer SL's viewer-server protocols  in a direction that makes a 
robust plug-in architecture viable in the long-run.


http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Pyogp

Lawson