Is Cobalt a kind of opensource "Second Life"? Or is it a "3D Squeak" for kids? Or is it only an academic toy?
Maybe there are many people having this kind of opinion. But we will present here our vision of "Cobalt" beeing a revolutionary plataform for business TI applications.
The Cobalt Studio & Navigator (in the figure) is an environment for development and presentation of regular applicattions (a data-entry form, by example) and a 3D space where many (less than 15, for good performance) users can meet each others to look, discuss and interact with some other applications, presented in panels. The strongest point of Cobalt is: these applications to be presented in the 3D space are developed like usual (2D) applications. Cobalt add a "3D layer" over them.
Today, business application architecture presents 3 "layers". We have 2 main options:
In the figure we are presenting the first layer having a "multiplayer application" but, like we have said, is possible, and easier, to have a "single player application" having its first layer developed and presented in Cobalt.
In the "multiplayer" case, the first layer is "peer-to-pier":
In the next lessons of this course we will learn how to develop - only beeing an example - a very basic and simple "system" having only 2 "applications". The first is a "single player application" - it can be in many computers on many countries - that does the registering of students (could be any kind of registering). For simplification, the file (SQL table) will have only 2 columns: "Name" and "Country".
The other application (multiplayer) of the system - to be used in virtual meetings - will be a report presenting the list of the students:
You will have the chance to do a real use of this "cobalted" system, that accesses our real database on our web-server - www.dmu.com - in Florida USA. You will register a new student and will see, inside the 3D space, the report showing "your" student.
But, lets go step by step....
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