Though I have an active hand in platform building, my central role on the Ogoglio project is to keep my eye on our long term goals and to understand the culture and infrastructure in which we deliver on those goals. In that role I have the occasional pleasure of pointing to someone's work and talking about cultural ramifications.
The other day Ian Smith posted a technical demonstration of Comet, which is a low level technology for communication between your web browser and an Ogoglio server. What he didn't mention is why we're using Comet in the Ogoglio platform and what it buys us.
A little background: When you load your average web page there are a lot of connections made to the remote servers using a common language called HTTP. If there's one thing the Internet can pass quickly and cheaply, it's HTTP. More importantly, every IT department in every organization makes very sure that their networks and firewalls allow HTTP traffic. Without HTTP there is no web.
The problem with using HTTP for Ogoglio spaces is that it wasn't originally built to send events like "Body started moving North" and "Door slammed" which need to move quickly so people don't see odd, jerky motion and which need to move in both directions between the client and server. For this reason no MMO or social world uses HTTP for world events and instead they use hand-tuned systems. If you've ever tried to play an MMO from inside a corporate network the chances are that it didn't work unless someone in the IT department was also a player and secretly opened the firewall to non-HTTP traffic, which they're loathe to do for security reasons.
Enter Comet. Enough web developers needed our flavor of bi-directional, fast event communication that they've worked out a way to juggle the details of HTTP a bit to use them in a new way. It's a bit like putting serious English on a pool ball, because Comet does things with HTTP which are a bit unexpected but which stay within the rules of the game.
Ogoglio spaces now use HTTP for all communication, which means that they're going to work where other spaces fail and they're going to be delivered without asking your IT department to make your network less secure. This is directly in line with our goal of enabling diverse communities of people to collaborate in online 3D spaces because diversity doesn't stop at the firewall.
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