Chris,

I think we made good progress in today's call and addressed many of the issues that Andy and Richard had (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Chris Webb <chris.webb@elastichosts.com> wrote:
It's a great shame Ben hasn't joined the occi-wg so far. I'd like to put on
the record my strong agreement with his points quoted above. I share his
horror at the idea of accessing a simple API to a simple service via two
layers of complex container formats, and agree that there has been no
technical argument for this other than vague and thoroughly unconvincing
references to 'enterprise users' and 'extensibility'.

I'd love to see Ben, Tim and all the other [potential] stakeholders involved as well and hope/suspect they will be before long.

To clarify, nobody's talking about "two layers of complex container formats", rather HTTP (which is assumed - I don't think there's any contention whatsoever about building on top of HTTP; at least there shouldn't be) and a very light layer of XML soley to provide sufficient common metadata for all resources (id, title, updated, etc.) as well as a mechanism to realise our model by way of links (with attributes on both the resources and the links between them). I assure you that if you were to try to do this from scratch in XML (as Andy suggested on the call) you will end up with something just like Atom anyway (I know because I did go through this very exercise), and that if it cannot be represented cleanly and completely in JSON and/or TXT formats then it will not be included... this places significant restrictions/controls on what is possible.

I'd like to be able to give you better reasoning than I have already but what I'm trying to do is deliver enough standardisation for interoperability without stifling innovation... I don't plan to bury anything in the content element but if some enterprise user wants to take advantage of some of the work done over the last 10 years, be it WS-*, CIM, OVF or something to be developed at e.g. SNIA then that's fine by me... I certainly don't want to stop them or force them to implement multiple protocols to get the stuff done that we chose not to cover.

And then of course there's the value of both [potentially] being able to get Google on board and taking advantage of their many thousands of man hours invested in GData clients already (simply by submitting patches to handle multiple namespaces).

I'm going to leave you guys to it for a few hours while I take a train to Paris, but very much appreciate your involvement and the lively discussion,

A bientôt,

Sam