To get input from others, and people who cannot keep up with the volume
on the email list, it would be really helpful if there were some kind of
summary/pointers of the OCCI "state of play" on the main OCCI docuwiki
web page.

I've proposed (and even set up) a blog but it hasn't [yet] taken off. I'm guessing this is the best way for those not actively involved in the list to keep up with current events.

It has been said many times this past month, but certainly the very
first goal of OCCI should be to settle on something totally trivial that
can be implemented, and then produce a few implementations that do
that. From my perspective the absolute most trivial thing would be to
instantiate a virtual host, get a handle to it, and then destroy it. It
sounds like this has already been done<snip>

Yes, with the status quo it goes something like this:

POST a web form to http://example.com/compute (e.g. cpu=2&memory=2048)
Follow redirect to new resource URL and GET resource as simple key-value in preferred format (text, json, xml)
Modify as required and PUT resource back where you got it.
DELETE resource when you're done with it.

I'm pretty sure it's not going to get any simpler nor any more RESTful than that... and it's pretty much implementable already. Note that you don't need to know anything more than how to submit a web form and pretty much every user agent that exists today can do that.

> Because we want to make use of prior art, at this point I am going to

> quote Andy's email from earlier today: "If we want to take the middle
> ground yet not sit on the fence it would be a useful exercise to see
> what [ GoGrid ] and [ Sun ] offer and do not offer? See where our
> efforts here could improve these published APIs and models?"

I've probably missed something. Why aren't you including EC2?

Ironically for the same IP issues that affect both Sun and GoGrid APIs - the absence of any patent protection whatsoever. Sure we "want to make use of prior art" as Alexis says, but only when it's safe to do so. As Mike Linksvayer (VP of Creative Commons) pointed out to Tim Bray:

Putting a spec under a liberal CC license is a no-brainer and Sun did the right thing in doing that. But that act's impact without a bunch of other stuff in place shouldn't be overhyped.

Surely GoGrid's patent-free, right? Not according to their launch press release:

GoGrid features several new patent-pending technologies offering a new approach to scalability and management of multi-server environments

I'm not going to waste my time running through Intellectual Property 101 again if people aren't going to listen anyway but I would ask that those pointing at potentially problematic APIs desist. It's just not worth the risk and the problem is not so difficult that we need to resort to copying others' work anyway, especially given how far we've come already.

Replicating the Sun Cloud API and adding two tablespoons of GoGrid and a pinch of OGF's rigid state model isn't going to work and is a huge step backwards from where we are now anyway.

Sam