Need some hints for study thesis

Hey folks,

I need some help. I am writing a university thesis about interface programming in SL. The idea is the following: I am going to build a train in SL which is supposed to drive a specific route. This is going to be hardcoded in the train's script.

The problem is the following: I would like to describe communication in two ways:
SL to "outer world"
"outer world" to SL

First way shouldn't be a problem, HTTP and emails will do the job. For the second aspect, I would like to start / stop my SL-train from an external application, either a Java App or a HTTP-page...

Could you give me some hints where I have to look for help concerning my idea's? Or at least some web-pages which could help me?

I am quite new to SL, but am quite fit in programming stuff...

I appreciate every answer

You can actually send an email from yourself outside of SL to an object inside SL.
Or you could have your SL object poll a web page for commands once and a while.

This url might help for other communication methods.

http://rpgstats.com/wiki/index.php?title=Communications

Thanks, that's already a good startup-help!

Any further recommendations?

As far as I can see at the moment, there are only 3 alternatives which I have to consider when dealing with the communication between SL and "outer world" in both ways:
- HTTP
- E-Mail
- XML-RPCs

Am I right so far?

You are correct. Those three options are available to you.

Though take into account that emails can and will take a long time to arrive (and you need to periodically poll for them) and xml-rpc as of late has also been causing problems.

Your best bet would be to have the train httprequest a given url at which you will put commands and/or keywords to change the trains behavior.

The SL viewer itself is open sourced. So for more complex interface programming, you could get that and start experimenting:

http://secondlifegrid.net/programs/open_source/code