SidesWays Blog

At work today we discussed the need for a relatively sophisticated permissions system for controlling access to various features at a site we are building. I realized that something similar to what we were talking about was designed and built way back in the early 1980s on the PLATO system. Here's an Antiques Roadshow tour of PLATO Access Lists using a game I worked on in college as an example.... (if you want the PDF version contact me ). Avatar: A Multi-Player Dungeons and Dragons Game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(PLATO_system_video_game) An Access List is a system-provided capability on PLATO that allows authors (developers) to create custom flags that can then be used to control access to various features of a lesson (program). The example shown here is for Avatar, a popular RPG on PLATO. Keep in mind that this was created in the early 1980s and 512 x 512 plasma (orange) panel screens were state-of-the-art at the time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_...

I've been looking around for a solution to messaging between devices since I'd like to experiment with creating a lite version of a game (Avatar) that I worked on in college as a learning experience. More about that at another time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(video_game) XMPP (Jabber) looks interesting. What's really attractive is that I may design the App with no server-side component with just message handling on the Internet. It's different since Avatar in college depended on shared memory (common) and only used a message queue for a portion of the game. Here's video that got me started (Hulu developers): Building Asynchronous Communication Layer w XMPP, Ruby, Javascript by Andrew Carter and Steve Jang http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZynQ04BuN8 And an interesting article: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Message_Queue_Evaluation_Notes And a JavaScript library to experiment with: http://strophe.im/strophejs/ Jabber server to experimen...