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.
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