The Web Services project for the second year FdEng Software Development students involves using http get and xml-rpc techniques for two way communication between an in-world avatar scanner and php/mysql on an external Web server.
This project has been underway for over two weeks and student response
has been enthusiastic. Most students now have a prototype avatar
scanner working. Several students have been spending a lot of time
outside college in-world. When many of the college PC's were
inaccessible for three days due to the worldwide fiasco caused by the
bug in McAfee anti-virus software, students were encouraged to work
from home and remote in-world support was provided.
The FdEng students have required relatively little support in learning
to use OpenSim. One of the main questions on starting out referred to
customising the gender of the default avatar. Some students spent a
considerable amount of time getting their appearance right, despite
the fact that the projects are individual and do not require social
interaction in-world.
The main problems encountered so far have been:
1) Students editing the terrain on their own initiative, necessitating
a reload of the terrain map from the simulator console.
2) OpenSim crashing every 24-48 hours, which necessitated a simulator
restart. This has been traced to one particular remote client, which
has been causing the simulator to spiral out of control by opening
more and more connections. Investigations are still underway to
determine the exact cause of the problem. The short term solution has
been to ask the student involved to refrain from logging in to OpenSim
from their home PC!
An end of project questionnaire for the students to complete has been
posted on the college VLE and the results of this will be posted to
this blog in due course. In addition a presentation on our use of
OpenSim will be made at the University of Greenwich eLearning
conference on July 7th 2010.
(http://web-dev-csc.gre.ac.uk/conference/conf62/index.php)
Clive Pro
