I'm often asked why I don't use Open Croquet (OC) as the platform for the Ogoglio project, so here is my linkslappable response. You'll get more out of this if you've read the Ogoglio project description and development document.
Open Croquet is Heroic: The folks working on OC are easily four times smarter than I am, but luckily my goals are only one quarter as difficult:
"Croquet was built to answer a simple question. 'If we were to create a new operating system and user interface knowing what we know today, how far could we go?' Further, what kinds of decisions would we make that we might have been unable to even consider 20 or 30 years ago, when the current operating systems were first created?"
I stopped working at a research lab partly because I tired of technologies with 10 year adoption curves. OC is a precursor for something huge, but in the mean time there's the web.
Open Croquet isn't on the web: To join an OC space you must run a stand-alone, peer to peer client. Most people won't (or in the case of corporate users, can't) install and maintain a new application to join each new online 3D space that comes along. How tired are you of updating Second Life and WoW clients every week? How painful will that be once there are a dozen spaces you'd like to visit on a regular basis?
Open Croquet isn't of the web: To build applications for OC you must learn Squeak, a language which isn't commonly used on the web. You must also grok OpenGL and distributed queueing. To host a OC space you must deploy Squeak, which most IT folks haven't even heard of. The pool of people who can write and deploy web applications is huge and growing, and I believe that group will write and deploy most of the 3D spaces in the near future.
Whenever I write about a technology that I considered and rejected I openly admit that it has one characteristic, existence, than beats the hell out of anything from the Ogoglio project. Right now I have a prototype, not a platform. I respect what the OC folks are doing and I'm impressed with their technical acumen.
Check out Julian's post Why Not Java: http://jlombardi.blogspot.com/2007/03/why-not-java.html
I'm not implying that he wrote it in response to this (similarly named) post, but the reasons he lists confirm the with heroic aspects of the Open Croquet project.
Open Croquet and the Ogoglio project have the same goals so it makes sense that they would use different technologies.
Posted by: Trevor F. Smith | March 24, 2007 at 05:31 PM