Second Life objects to become HTTP-aware

While Second Life users wait with 'bated breath for the SLS 1.27 deployment that will sort out a large number of crippling group communications failures, there's an extra bonus lurking in the code. SLS1.27 will be adding an HTTP-in feature which will allow HTTP requests to be sent to Second Life objects.

At present, Second Life objects can only 'dial out' to external Web-servers and services, but with few practical methods of communicating that external data and resources have changed, many object creators have had to settle for frequent polling of Web-services for data.

The HTTP-in method, will allow external services to push data to in-world objects and receive simple responses, saving significant quantities of bandwidth and server resources. That, right there, stands to revolutionize a lot of scripted systems.

Documentation for the new communications subsystem is available, and the feature can already be trialled live on Aditi, the beta/preview grid.

There are a number of key conditions that scripters will have to watch out for that invalidate object URLs, but it appears that all of these are simple enough to test for. Externally accessible URLs are a limited resource due to technical limitations, and every sim will have a limited number which will be apportioned according to rules that are similar to prim-allocation-by-parcel.

A pilot rollout of SLS 1.27 was to have been deployed to approximately 500 simulators this-morning, but has been unexpectedly pushed back one day.

Currently the full deployment of SLS 1.27 is due Tuesday and Wednesday next week (the 14th and 15th of July).

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