C5 conference this month!

Just a reminder that "C5-06" is drawing near -- The Fourth  
International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating  
through Computing" will be held January 26 and 27th at UC Berkeley -  
please join us!

Our program committee has assembled a great collection of keynotes,  
papers, demos and panels over the two day period.  Details can be  
seen here:

http://www.db.soc.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/c5-06/

There is still some space available!  Please join us -- if you are  
already planning to come, but have yet to register online, please do  
now (early registration closes soon).

Please forward this email to members of your community whom you think  
might benefit.

C5 conference this month!

Just a reminder that "C5-06" is drawing near -- The Fourth  
International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating  
through Computing" will be held January 26 and 27th at UC Berkeley -  
please join us!

Our program committee has assembled a great collection of keynotes,  
papers, demos and panels over the two day period.  Details can be  
seen here:

http://www.db.soc.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/c5-06/

There is still some space available!  Please join us -- if you are  
already planning to come, but have yet to register online, please do  
now (early registration closes soon).

Please forward this email to members of your community whom you think  
might benefit.

Persistence and worldbase server

Hi,

a question to persistence and worldbase servers (not shure if this  
occured already in this list):

what kind of persistence  - if any - provides the next available  
release ("hedgehog", 1.0) ? I've something read about worldbase  
servers, but it sounds like  a big solution for big networks. But I  
want to use maybe 5 instances of Croquet in a closed team for storing  
and searching issues (requirements or feature requests for example),  
what can I do in this case ?
(That the image itself provides some kind of persistence  is clear,  
but one great value of databases is making queries )

Regards

Hans

Re: Persistence and worldbase server

Hi Hans,

I don't believe that Worldbase Servers are available or programmed yet.

In principle, lots of continuously running servers with an "invisible"
avatar in each Croquet world would keep a copy of the world alive and
in memory for clients to instantly visit as needed.

A lot depends on what you want to persist, how frequently it changes,
if the instance currently used and persisted at the same time, how
large is the data set, how many users need access to the data
simultaneously if at all, will this be peer-to-peer or will you have a
server available, will you be archiving avatars, 3D players/costumes
or other 3D artifacts, etc.

Squeak's "Magma" OODB can run a small workgroup of concurrent users
and save instances of many kinds of classes, including indexing and
sorting classes. It can run inside the user's image or run in a
separate instance on the same computer or run on a separate server.

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2665

Mailing list:
magma <at> discuss.squeakfoundation.org

Archives / Subscribe:
http://discuss.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/ezmlm-browse?list=magma

Other Squeak persistency solutions which may match more familar data structures:
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3582

Fwd: Persistence and worldbase server

[Forgot to reply-all.]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Howard Stearns <hstearns <at> wisc.edu>
> Date: January 21, 2006 10:00:05 AM CST
> To: Hans N Beck <hnbeck <at> t-online.de>
> Subject: Re: [croquet] Persistence and worldbase server
>
> I think in terms of in- and out-of-band:
>
>    Objects in or within Croquet are live objects situated in  
> context. You poke at them and they respond according to their  
> abilities, other objects can be affected, and everyone else sees  
> these effects.
>
>    But Croquet is part of a larger context of computers and the  
> Internet at large.  For example, you can have a Jabber chat window  
> within Croquet, and use this to communicate 'out-of-band' with  
> people who are not using Croquet.  And you can go around  
> serializing the state of Croquet objects and put them in an  
> external database. You can query such a database and unserialize  
> the data back into Croquet as different copies. The distinction (in  
> my mind) is that the out-of-band stuff aren't live objects situated  
> in context.
>
> Jasmine already has a basic out-of-band Worldbase interface. The  
> University of Minnesota runs an open SQL server for experimental  
> use, and you can use that as a model and set up your own to meet  
> your needs.

Re: Persistence and worldbase server

On Jan 23, 2006, at 7:07 AM, Howard Stearns wrote:
>>
>>    But Croquet is part of a larger context of computers and the  
>> Internet at large.  For example, you can have a Jabber chat window  
>> within Croquet, and use this to communicate 'out-of-band' with  
>> people who are not using Croquet.

Jabber is also a way to advertise that you are "present" in a Croquet  
world to people who are not in-world with you. The combination of  
being able to chat and advertise presence is why my group has been  
integrating Jabber into Croquet for a while now. See the demo at  
C5 . Ideally one should also be able to do VoIP to call people  
outside of the Croquet space, do video conferencing across the semi- 
permeable membrane that separates the Croquet world from the "real"  
world, and so on.

Serializing objects and meta information, and stuffing them into an  
external, searchable database is also something that has been going  
on for a while now,
and the experimental WorldBase we have been running is another  
example of allowing for a semi-permeable membrane between the two  
worlds (Croquet/real).

>> And you can go around serializing the state of Croquet objects and  
>> put them in an external database. You can query such a database  
>> and unserialize the data back into Croquet as different copies.  
>> The distinction (in my mind) is that the out-of-band stuff aren't  
>> live objects situated in context.
>>

Re: Persistence and worldbase server

[oops! Only sent this to Mark the first time.]

Mark P. McCahill wrote:
> 
> On Jan 23, 2006, at 7:07 AM, Howard Stearns wrote:
> 
>>>
>>>    But Croquet is part of a larger context of computers and the 
>>> Internet at large.  For example, you can have a Jabber chat window 
>>> within Croquet, and use this to communicate 'out-of-band' with 
>>> people who are not using Croquet.
> 
> 
> Jabber is also a way to advertise that you are "present" in a Croquet 
> world to people who are not in-world with you. The combination of  being
> able to chat and advertise presence is why my group has been 
> integrating Jabber into Croquet for a while now. See the demo at  C5
> .

Which demo, Mark? Which C5?

Anyone know of a free link (non-IEEE or -ACM) to the demo?

Jabber's a very interesting protocol that may enable ways to integrate
lower powered devices into Croquet worlds.

TIA!

Bob

Re: Persistence and worldbase server

On Jan 23, 2006, at 1:54 PM, Bob Courchaine wrote:

>>>>    But Croquet is part of a larger context of computers and the
>>>> Internet at large.  For example, you can have a Jabber chat window
>>>> within Croquet, and use this to communicate 'out-of-band' with
>>>> people who are not using Croquet.
>>
>>
>> Jabber is also a way to advertise that you are "present" in a Croquet
>> world to people who are not in-world with you. The combination of   
>> being
>> able to chat and advertise presence is why my group has been
>> integrating Jabber into Croquet for a while now. See the demo at  C5
>> .
>
> Which demo, Mark? Which C5?
>

the demo I'll do this week (thursday) at C5-2006 for the
Vector Fields, Vehicles, and Virtual Presence paper.

> Anyone know of a free link (non-IEEE or -ACM) to the demo?
>
> Jabber's a very interesting protocol that may enable ways to integrate
> lower powered devices into Croquet worlds.
>
> TIA!
>
> Bob

Re: Persistence and worldbase server