Hypergrid : what is the best grid ?

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Maria Korolov, Editor in Chief of Hypergrid Business, published by Trombly Ltd., a Hong Kong-based communications firm with offices in Boston, Shanghai and Mumbai, is the author of the contribution “What is the best grid ?“.

Maria Korolov is president of Trombly Ltd. Subsidiaries include the China Speakers Bureau, the largest speakers bureau for greater China, providing China experts to speak at conferences and events around the world.

One of the columnists of Hypergrid Business is Adam Frisby, head of Research and Development at DeepThinkLabs, an international company headquartered in Perth, Western Australia. Adam Frisby  has been using and developing for Virtual Worlds since 1997, he is a recognized industry professional and has been influential in the development of several key virtual world technologies including OpenSimulator, OpenViewer, Xenki, libsecondlife. Adam is also a member of several Virtual World standards bodies including the Linden Lab® Architecture Working Group.

Maria Korolov says that besides the isolated virtual worlds in cyberspace like Second Life, World of Warcraft, OpenLifeGrid and others, there are a few worlds which are on the hypergrid — accessible to travelers from other worlds via hyperlinks ( hypergrid teleports). The main are OSGrid, ReactionGrid, ScienceSim, FrancoGrid and Grid4Us.

OSGrid is the place for OpenSim developers and hobbyists running regions on their home computers or on spare servers. All the cool new features get tested first at OSgrid, like voice and vehicle physics.

If you like teachers, you need to be on ReactionGrid. Intel has a conference center here. ReactionGrid runs stable, older versions of OpenSim, tested and debugged, making it good for teachers or small businesses looking for a nice, reliable place to meet with students or clients.

If you want to do experiments, or watching them done, goto ScienceSim. Check out Galileo, Einstein, Kepler and other interesting builds.

FrancoGrid is the top French-speaking grid on the hypergrid and Grid4Us is best for hanging out with Germans.

Maria Korolov concludes that the best grid is the grid you build yourself and she gives an overview about OpenSim Hosting Providers.

FrancoGrid : Metavers 3D Francophone Libre

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Last update : April 10,2013

Logo Francogrid

Logo Francogrid

FrancoGrid est un espace virtuel en trois dimensions, un metavers libre et francophone. Le logiciel Open Source OpenSimulator est le « moteur » de Francogrid, il est compatible avec le client de Second Life ™. L’équipe de Francogrid maintient une grille où chacun est libre de connecter son propre simulateur et ainsi, d’agrandir l’espace avec de nouvelles régions virtuelles !

L’objectif est d’exploiter au mieux ce nouveau support de communication et d’organiser la collaboration entre les membres. L’équipe de Francogrid veut soutenir activement le projet OpenSimulator par le rapport de bugs, le développement de “patch”, des expérimentations, et la réalisation de tutoriels.

Le site web de Francogrid comprend plusieurs blogs avec une liste d’évenements, des partenaires, des statistiques et des nouvelles.

OpenSimulator : create a virtual environment similar to Second Life™

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Last update : January 22, 2013

logo by Adam Frisby

OpenSimulator logo by Adam Frisby

OpenSimulator (OpenSim) is a 3D Application Server that can be used to create a virtual environment (or world) similar to Second Life™. OpenSimulator is released under a BSD License, making it both open source, and commercially friendly to embed in products. Environments, protocols and features are supported via add on modules. The available modules (alternative gridservers, plugins and region modules, etc) are hosted on OpenSim Forge. OpenSimulator is powered by the community members that devote time and energy to the effort.

OpenSim is still at an alpha code maturity stage, the current latest releases is 0.7.6  released on October 4, 2013 (git source repository). OpenSimulator requires either the .Net Framework version 3.5, or Mono 2.4.3 or newer.

The OpenSimulator website provides documentation, FAQ’s, grid lists, bug reports, wish lists, forums, configuration files, news, blogs, rss feeds, technical reference, IRC channels, links, support and other informations concerning the development of the OpenSim project.

The following 3D Viewers are known to work with OpenSim : Official Second Life ™ Viewer, Hippo Viewer, Imprudence Viewer, realXtend Viewer and Meerkat Viewer.

An up-to-date coverage of the OpenSim technology is offered in-depth by the Hypergrid Business magazine.

Some commercial providers of OpenSim virtual worlds are listed hereafter :

Google Wave : an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration

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last update : 21 August 2011

In August 2010, Google announced that Wave would no longer be developed as a standalone product, but that the Wave technology would survive in other products. The following informations refer to the initial plans.

The Google Wave product is currently available as a developer preview. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop. Google Wave can also be considered as a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. A wave is shared. A wave is live.

The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, Google intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

Users can request an invitation to Google Wave Preview and developers can request an Wave sandbox account.

Google Chrome OS : an open source operating system

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Two days ago, Google announced on the official Google Blog the open-sourcing  of the project Chromium OS, presented in july 2009. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on, one year before  Google Chrome OS will be ready for users. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions.

The release of Chromium OS includes:

  • Chromium Blog
  • Source code
  • Design docs
  • User interface experiments
  • How to build and contribute
  • Short overview video

Google Product Search & Merchant Center

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Google Base is a place where users can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which will be made searchable on Google. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they do related searches. Google Base is is free and is currently available with English and German interfaces. Iinformations about all types of online and offline content are submitted to Google Base via a data feed or Google Base API.

Google Merchant Center is another way to manage Product-type items.  It’s a new service that makes it easy to upload and manage the Product listings you want to appear in Google Product Search, AdWords, and other Google properties.

Compared to Google Base, the Google Merchant Center provides a better, optimized experience specifically for merchants. Google will continue adding features and improving the tools for uploading and managing product listings. Accounts using Google Base for Product listings have already been transferred to the Merchant Center.

The Google Product Search application is currently still in a beta version.

ROR : Resources of a Resource

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ROR (Resources of a Resource) is an independant XML format for describing any object (products, services, reviews, discounts, images, events, schedule, podcasts, …)  in a generic fashion, so that any search engine can better understand that content. rorweb.com is the official ROR website.

ROR promotes the concept of structured feeds (which is related to the concept of structured blogging) enabling search engines to complement text search with structured information to better understand meaning. ROR information is typically stored in a ROR feed called ror.xml placed in a website’s main directory.

The specifications of ROR have been updated last in march 2005. The ROR website provides FAQ’s, sample ROR feeds, a Developer’s corner, a blog,  free tools and lists of ROR providers and terms. It seems however that there are currently no new activities going on at the ROR website.

The Apache CouchDB Project

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Apache CouchDB is a document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript. CouchDB also offers incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution. CouchDB provides a RESTful JSON API than can be accessed from any environment that allows HTTP requests.

CouchDB is written in Erlang, a robust functional programming language ideal for building concurrent distributed systems. Erlang allows for a flexible design that is easily scalable and readily extensible.

Manage your Amazon S3 Account with Ease

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Amazon S3 is a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Several software clients are available to manage an S3 account with ease, some are listed below:

  • S3 Browser : freeware (version 1.9.7 ; 1.9.8 beta) and pro licence available from NetSDK Software
  • Cyberduck : FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac OS X
  • BucketExplorer : different licenses starting at 49.99$ available for Windows, MAC and Linux
  • FireFox S3 : free plugin for FireFox browser
  • CloudBerry : freeware Windows client
  • CloudBuddy : CloudBuddy Personal is a free tool brought to you by CSS Lab

Same origin policy

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In computing, the same origin policy is an important security concept for a number of browser-side programming languages, such as JavaScript. The policy permits scripts running on pages originating from the same site to access each other’s methods and properties with no specific restrictions, but prevents access to most methods and properties across pages on different sites.

The concept of same origin policy is often extended to define roughly compatible security boundaries for other web scripting languages, such as Adobe Flash, or for mechanisms other than direct DOM manipulation, e.g.  XMLHttpRequest (Ajax).

The most popular ways to do cross domain calls via JavaScript are :

  • proxies : the most common approache (your script calls your server, your server makes the call to the remote server and then returns the result back to the client)
  • JSON : callback (the remote server needs to accept an additional parameter: a callback function)
  • Flash : bridge (Flash can enable the capability of remote access by placing a special XML policy-file on the remote server to accept requests from other domains)