Cool stuff! programs seems to work ok here. I experimented with this a while back see we use the same approach. You can not only load textures this way but also geometry into VBO/DPL, load and compile shader programs or any other OpenGL resource for that matter.

To bad that this approach requires a context switch I made a small grid bassed world system that would automaticly stream in new models/textures when needed but the switching of contexts gave me pretty large framedrops. Hope that OGL 4.X wil have a solution for this like DX10 and DX11.