The lily service is made up of several distinct pieces, and we developers need to come up with a consistent set of terms to refer to those pieces. I'm sure that I have been inconsistent what I have written so far (both on this TWiki and everywhere else), but I'm hoping that if I try to write down some list of specific terms then we can eventually come up with a list that all of us are using consistently. Note that I know very little about how most other (non-lily) projects use a MOO in general, or LambdaMOO in particular, so I don't know if the following terms are similar to what other projects would use. If not, we should probably adjust our terms to be more like what other MOO-implementors use.

But for now, we have:

• lily service -- I'll say this is what we end up with once we put all the other pieces together... It's a chat-service that people get accounts on, log into, and send messages to each-other or to a variety of discussions.

• LambdaMOO -- this is the program, written in C, which implements a "MOO environment" which we use to implement the lily service. There are several programs which can implement a "MOO environment", but for lily we have picked this specific one. We have also made a few custom changes to it that our lilycoreDB depends on, but those are only a few lines of changes. The official web site for the LambdaMOO project is http://sourceforge.net/projects/lambdamoo/

• "MOO engines" -- I think this is the name I want to use for the category of programs like LambdaMOO. So, the programs which implement a "MOO environment". I guess I could call them "MOO interpreters", but somehow that seems too tame a term to me, given all that these programs have to do. These programs are part database, part interpreter, part network-connection controller, part access-control, and part task-manager.

• lilycoreDB -- At least in LambdaMOO, the entire MOO environment can be considered as one large database. That database includes all the "MOO code" which actually implement anything (which MOO likes to call 'verbs'), and a bunch of objects that define things like players and discussions. In the case of lily, we have a minimal set of verbs and properties which implement the lily service, along with the first "player" object (for the initial administrative user), and one or two initial discussion-objects. We call this collection the "lilycoreDB", as is any other database which started out with this initial set of verbs, properties, and objects.

(I'll do some more work on this later on. gad)

-- GaranceDrosehn - 09 Dec 2005
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