Pyogp/Background

In progress Enus Linden 13:04, 23 July 2008 (PDT)

Overview

What is it?

Linden Lab and its community based AWG (in-world discussion group page) are working together to develop a set of open protocols (called the Open Grid Protocol (OGP)) that can be used to create a virtual world where regions are independently operated (not only by Linden Lab). The project is aiming to allow people (organizations, individuals, and the like) to host their own regions in the virtual world and be able to interact and communicate with people in regions hosted elsewhere. In essence, the project's goal is to allow open-source region hosting.

AWG and Linden Lab plan to share the effort in writing a test harness which executes tests against implementations of the Open Grid Protocol. The intent is not to test SL or OpenSim (or gridX) themselves. Rather, the desire is to create a framework where the implementations of the protocols can be tested in any virtual environment implemented per the Open Grid Protocols as documented. The goal is to use the test harness to test the implementations to make sure that the virtual environment is interoperable with the other virtual environments that have implemented the OGP. However, we also plan to test the current SL protocols (the Legacy protocols). We plan to be able to test at the smallest functional level possible, akin to unit testing, and to have the ability to use the framework to sequence steps to enable state specific tests to be run.

The longer term vision is essentially a client library, capable of navigating the grid and interacting with the various hosts, sitting next to a testing framework, happily running along telling us what works where, and where something needs a little attention to work according to specification...

For a smidge more detail on OGP, see a visual representation of the upcoming projects and a general introduction.