RESTbot Unveiled

August 14, 2007; 04:07 AM
Pleiades (http://www.pleiades.ca) unveiled a new technology at a release event in the Second Life virtual immersive environment. The technology, RESTbot (where "REST" stands for Representational State Transfer), allows popular web languages to work through Second Life. RESTbots appear as "unmanned" avatars in Second Life, and use XML to act as an intermediary between the world wide web and the metaverse.

"This is the first and only way for applications written in PHP or Perl to interact with Second Life," explains Pleiades software developer Andrew Ortman. "It will let developers like me run web services that can access data Second Life exclusively provides to users of its client software. I think the community will find that very exciting."

Pleiades President Patrick Edwards-Daugherty has indicated the code base will be available to developers. "RESTbot and its related plugins will be open source. They use the .NET framework and a Mono compatible codebase, which in turn are open source. That means developers will be able to extend the RESTbot code base freely. It is a key component in our latest immersive learning environments, and we expect other developers will benefit from, and add to, RESTbot."

At a pre-launch demonstration of the technology, Ortman showed how a simulator monitor written in Javascript was able to use RESTbot to capture simulation statistics in real time. "Pleiades is looking to web services providers as early-stage adopters for the RESTbot technology," he noted.