Programming, Metaverses, APIs

Data Abstraction Layers in the Metaverse— Why Metaverse Devs Have All the Fun

Hint: It’s because metaverses typically require multiple data sources. :-)

AI image courtesy of Midjourney. I asked it to imagine “a wild and imaginative metaverse scene with numerous characters and avatars present. Feeling is positive, optimistic, and technical — ar 3:2 — s 250 — v 6.0”. I think it did a fantastic job here, and will be useful in the article below, as it’s got a lot going on (and that’s what we’re going to talk about!).

I thought it would be fun to talk about Data Abstraction Layers (DALs) a bit today, as many of my readers are huge fans of metaverses (e.g., The Sandbox Game, Decentraland, etc.), which are likely heavy users of this type of programming best practice.

DALs generally exist as APIs between a system’s codebase and it’s various data sources. Instead of having your code interact with databases directly, you would have your code interact with the DAL instead, which then interacts with the data for you. This may sound like a way to overcomplicate something, but it’s actually just the opposite, and I’ll explain why below.

[By the way, you might come across highly similar terms like ODLs (aka Operational Data Layers or Open Data Layers). But I generally refer to this type of tech as the Database Abstraction Layer — a topic that, as chance would have it, I built an entire career from mastering just one such example!]

As today’s software development projects become increasingly complex, it’s becoming more commonplace for new software to have to interface with multiple sources for files and data. This…