Trying to make a start with libsecondlife

One of my diversions today has been investigating the use of libsecondlife. I’ve got quite a specific use case in mind at the moment – automation of some administrative tasks for a project I’m involved with – but it was interesting to dig around in the code in general.

First of all I have to say that the project website is kind of short on help for beginners… there is no obvious starting point, and little or no documentation on the API. I downloaded the latest build, which gave me some interesting GUI and command-line demos to play with that enable you to look at group memberships and so forth. In order to really get to grips with it, I had to take the source out of SVN and look through the C# code – reading the comments and code is far better than playing around with binaries that don’t do what you want in the first place.

If you are coming at libSL new, it may be useful to know that if you have SharpDevelop, the whole of the source tree can be opened very easily as a single solution, and I had no problems building some of the examples. I did have some issues trying to run them, though… but maybe I’m just driving them wrong. So far, I’m still at a bit of a loss as to exactly how it all hangs together – but some of the examples look very useful.

Via the forums, I did discover that there’s also a Java implementation. I think I’ll take a look at that too…