Chet Murphy, experienced distributed systems developer at IBM is to collaborate with Linden Lab and open source developers on the Certified HTTP project, one of the next generation technologies that will underpin the new Second Life architecture, and potentially be incorporated into many virtual worlds and MMOs in future.
IBM has a solid history of participating in and contributing to open source projects of various stripes, and this marks the first direct, practical collaboration between Linden Lab and IBM since the announcement of their collaboration on virtual worlds standards approximately one month ago.
Certified HTTP is an escrow/brokered system that allows guaranteed operation and confirmation of operations between multiple systems, using HTTP as the underlying network protocol.
Essentially it implements reliable transactions - something which HTTP itself isn't really so very good at. In the common HTTP scheme, if the requesting side receives an error (or a broken connection) it is not at all clear what operations (if any) were actually performed (or not performed) and if it is safe to retry the operation.
When you're moving money or virtual property around in an MMO or virtual world, nobody wants the operation to happen twice, or three times - or the money/items to be removed from you, but never delivered.
The CHTTP codebase has so far been under the MIT license, but is to be relicensed under Apache Public License v2, where it can be used for a wide variety of virtual worlds and MMOs.
