User:Gareth Ellison/Views of the Gareth

Gareth Nelson's views on the new grid architecture

As always I must let my views be known in a mildly eccentric manner. I shall do so upon this wiki.

So, watch this space and the rest of the wiki articles for my views.......

General considerations

• The network protocol needs to be headed towards something RFCish to really take off
• There needs to be multiple implementations of every component of the whole system

Comments on central services

The idea of central services under the control of LL makes sense on purely technical grounds (centralise search, domain lookup, L$ and identity management) but the social and legal issues need to be analysed further: Would LL still enforce the TOS as strictly for 3rd party sims that merely make use of these central services?

Viewer architecture

Where all end users see it all: everything starts here.

A few points as to how the viewer should function:

• Cross-platform
  • The viewer needs to be accessible to as many platforms as possible, I am personally of the view that a minimal library of core protocol functions needs

  to be maintained as a seperate project to enable fast porting to new platforms

• Lightweight
  • The viewer as it stands is to be blunt a bloated mess - I believe that the structure of the code could do with some improvement
  • On top of the code structure, the system requirements are too high
• Graceful degradation of content
  • Tieing in with the previous point - the viewer is all or nothing: you have all the fancy new features or you have nothing