10-27-2004 10:03
During the development of the first major service offering of the SL Exchange I realized I have created a system that may be of interest to other developers, and I am just tossing this out there to see if my feeling is correct.

I have created a completely automated and self-correcting service where an external database keeps track of certain objects in Second Life. Current object data that is tracked and kept up to date is:
-Object name
-Status
-Last Update
-Region
-Coordinates
-Object type
-Hash key for secure and optional encrypted communications (security routines still in development)
-XMLRPC channel

On the LSL scripts side of things, the system is built on top of a OO-like standardized communications framework I have come up with that can (and should) handle communications for all scripts in the object or prim. This system handles all outbound email, in- and out-bound xmlrpc, and listens via a standardized protocol of tagged link messages between scripts.

Objects automatically initialize or update themselves on rez, on "Object Tracking Module" script reset, and optionally on inventory change.

The server keeps track of objects by sending a "ping" to each one after 4 hours of inactivity ("inactivity" being how long since the last communication with that object). After 8 hours of disconnectivity (2 failed pings) an object's status is set as inactive and after 7 days of disconnectivity an object is deleted from the database outright at which time polling for that object stops. I still have yet to test this system with large numbers of objects, so I have not yet finalized my timeouts and such. Since I will be multithreading the server process that polls objects, I can probably get the system much closer to real-time.


It would be a fairly trivial task for me to create a web service or similar communications method to allow others to utilize this functionality for a fee. Is this something that you are interested in?

*Due to time constraints of SL Exchange development, this service will not be available for external use (outside SL Exchange) until at least a couple months from now.
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Apotheus Silverman
Shop SL on the web - SLExchange.com

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