In a virtual world there are many places where an actor (either an avatar directed by a human, an avatar directed by a program (bot), or a scripted object) wants to do something to an object. Something other than just directly change a property of the object. The LSL programming model is that scripts react to events. So I propose we unify commands, LSL events and REST by manipulating even queues.

Proposal

If http://sim.ulat.or/obj/oid is the url to some object with id oid, and we have a http connection to http://sim.ulat.or then

• PUT /obj/oid/eq -- adds a new event to the queue (at the end)
• PUT /obj/oid/eq/0 -- adds a new event to the queue at the beginning
• PUT /obj/oid/eq/9 -- same behaviour as PUT /obj/oid/eq
• GET /obj/oid/eq -- returns the full event queue
• PUT /obj/oid/eq/eventid -- changes the event (or adds one) with id eventid
• GET /obj/oid/eq/eventid -- returns the event with id eventid or an error
• GET /obj/oid/eq/0 -- returns the first event from the queue or an error
• GET /obj/oid/eq/9 -- returns the last event in the queue
• DELETE /obj/oid/eq/eventid -- removes an event from the queue and returns it
• DELETE /obj/oid/eq/0 -- removes the first event from the queue and returns it, or returns an error

And maybe

• PUT /obj/oid/eq -- add a bunch of events to a queue
• PUT /eq -- add a bunch of events to a bunch of objects?

What a PUT really sends to the server

Supose we are telling the server about the avy touching an object. The actual text that gets sent might look like:

   PUT /obj/oid/eq HTTP/1.1
   Host: sim.ulat.or
   Content-Type: application/json
   Content-Length: xxxx
   
   {"touch_start":{"force":13,"avy":"uuid","time":1311663233}}

So you can see it is fairly heavy weight compared to a tuned command language. I will investigate what subsequent requests look like when using the http 1.1 persistent connection features. At the worst the http overhead can be amortised across many commands by using the last two forms of request. The last would look like:

   PUT /eq HTTP/1.1
   Host: sim.ulat.or
   Content-Type: application/json
   Content-Length: xxxx
   
   [{command1...},{command2...},...]