On May 12, 2009, at 9:09 AM, Sam Johnston wrote:
You have argued on many occasions that mechanical transformation of the OCCI protocol data format is a key requirement. I've never understood why, and I've never engaged in a protocol design where this was an issue. Could you expand on why this matters? -Tim
True, but I've also cited on many occasions use cases that rely on specific formats. Here's a dozen that come to mind and would otherwise have to be manually coded by each implementor:
Ah, I get it. I 100% agree that this is a problem. We thought about this a lot in the Sun-API design process. But ended up in a different place. We were pretty convinced that REST was the right basis for the API. It just can't be beat in terms of integration flexibility and network-friendliness. The problem is, a lot of programmers and sysadmins don't want to talk directly to a REST interface. So, what we did was write simple wrapper libraries in Java, Ruby, and Python (someone's working on PHP too) that give you VM, PrivateNetwork, Cluster, and so on classes wrapped around the REST/ JSON calls. Plus, a little command-line tool (in python, so it should run on anything) so you can say cloud_command --list --cluster Database cloud_command --attach --privateNetwork PN1 --vm Database/3X03 We'll be publishing those under an Apache2 license Real Soon Now. I'm unconvinced that auto-generation of different version of your protocols messages will be that much help to sysadmins and script- writers and so on, but you're closer to the use-cases than I am. -Tim
Sysadmins conducting routine tasks with shell scripts (TXT) Task scheduling with cron (TXT) Automatic/autonomic task mechanisation, e.g. failover, recovery (TXT) Users wanting to learn the API/kick the tyres by hand (TXT) Exporting of [collections of] resources in arbitrary formats (OVF, VMX, etc.) Documentation generation (ODF) Report generation (PDF) Diagramming (SVG) Accounting (CSV) Mapping to other protocols/implementations (EC2) End user web interface (HTML) End user RIA (XUL) etc. As for standards, one could point at XML and the subsequent need to create XSLT ;)
Sam
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