I never was much of a Mac personality. But even then, back in the days of MacOS 7, when I was still hooked on Atari, Win95, and the early Linux, there was a thing that raised my attention: Hey, is it scriptable? Somehow I heard, and that caught my immediate attention, these fancy windowed apps on the funny looking Mac computers could talk to eachother, share their special abilities, and even perform simple tasks without having a user press the buttons. Wow, scriptable. I decided to be a programmer, and chose the “Glue Language” Perl as my matter of subject. (Glue Language meaning: You can take a part of this Website, stuff it into your database, perform some math on it, and make it a nice looking picture on that Website. One would call that “Mashup” today, minus the fancy standardized interfaces, JSON, XML, XMLRPC…) Anyway, the Glue: Perl, PHP and Python became, and still is my daily work.
Jump to 2006. I just refrained from a Job as a CTO in a big Cisco Training company, where of course I was doing the Glue stuff, Reading and cleaning the MSSQL backend from the CRM, making the CMS talk different languages, spread on different TLDs, and building a fancy new information system and time schedule for the Cisco instructors.
I found Second Life, dived in, and got immersed. And I found a smutty little pearl of scripting language, called LSL (Linden Scripting Language), taking the role of the glue that “diese Welt im Innersten zusammenhält” (Goethe, Faust I). For a second time, in this brave new world, I decided to be a scripter, a glue maker, a mashup puppeteer. With our Primforge group, we did such awesome jobs as exporting Second Life Avatars to the weblin World, build the Gamesload Tower of games, a Career Center for a huge consultants agency, an island for a insurance company, that media center for a Radio station, and much, much more.
Building stuff, interconnecting worlds, paring email or twitter, this employee database, your personal website, and that VoIP service to this fancy new island and collaborational meeting place was my job, and I hope that will always be my job. And of course I’m actively scanning for new worlds to conquer as part of my daily business life.
I still think that all roads begin in Second Life, the one single commercial world, that has all fancy options, and a broad user base. But then, there is OpenSim, the “Apache of Virtual Worlds” as they call it… Back in 2007 some programmers started to reengineer the answer packets, that come from the Second Life sims, and launched a programming project called Opensim. Just like the basic unit of Second Life, one Opensim Simulator creates the virtual space of 256×256 meters land, you can visit with the normal Second Life Client program. But there’s more: With the Grid Server you can host a huge number of opensims, with a common user base, just like the Second Life world. An with the latest Hypergrid, you can even teleport from one hosted Opensim Grid to another. Hypergrid is a coarse protocol, that doesn’t care too much about the permissions of the different Grids that are connected intertwingulary. But there is OGP, the Open Grid Protocol. The guys that invented OGP (mainly from IBM and Linden Lab) are just trying to put together a standardisation request, to make OGP an official protocol, just like HTTP (running the requests from your browser and the answers from my webserver while you read this text) or SMTP (the protocol that receives and transfers your daily emails).
We will soon launch a server farm of Opensim Machines. And I’m really looking forward to glue this all together, our trails of communication in the flat world, the mobile paths, and the new and old 3D worlds.
