Hippo, Imprudence, and some other viewers use GridInfo requests to pre-populate their selectable list of grids with info people need to connect. It's nothing more than a GET to <entered_url>/get_grid_info which returns some XML.

The attached patch adds basic support for these requests if you enter the SimianGrid frontend base URL into, say, the Imprudence grid manager. It'll pull some basic info, e.g. login and website URLs. There are a few shortcomings though:

1) Current viewer-side GridInfo implementations (only tested Hippo and Imprudence) don't handle 302 redirects. So in the viewer's grid manager you need to enter the SimianGrid frontend URL with a trailing slash. While this is technically correct, humans often think trailing slashes in URLs are optional. This should be fixed on the viewer side.

2) The wording in the viewer grid manager boxes asks you (I forget exact wording) to enter in the grid's login URL to pull the grid info. But IMO this really isn't something the core grid services, particularly the login service, should be bothered with. Where users go to register for accounts or change their password, etc., are things which should be handed by the frontend. And they're things which lend themselves well to an MVC structure. So this patch has the frontend handle the GridInfo requests, not the backend login service. Though the included .htaccess will redirect GridInfo requests if they're sent to the login server.

3) This stuff should really be driven from the web UI and not config files, but that will come with time. This is just to provide the basics for now.

Let me know if you have any feedback. I'm honestly not married to this patch; I don't use GridInfo myself.

-coyled

I've been slow getting to this but I did look the patch over. It looks good, but I'm thinking about dropping the .htaccess redirect and just providing good instructions on the frontend of what URL to enter to gridinfo support. The original SimianGrid code made heavy use of .htaccess and it was the number one pain point for new installations. Default Linux installs not setup for it, shared hosting plans not providing support for it, difficult to tell whether it is working or not, etc.

Revised patch commited in http://code.google.com/p/openmetaverse/source/detail?r=395