On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 3:04 AM, Tim Bray <Tim.Bray@sun.com> wrote:
On May 26, 2009, at 5:48 PM, Sam Johnston wrote:
<XXX, doesn't matter what> isn't going to work and is a huge step
backwards from where we are now anyway.
Where are you now anyway? Facing a glaring lack of consensus on pretty well everything. I'd be careful about characterizing anything as a step back.
Actually the only thing we *don't* have consensus on is whether or not to follow the leaders (Google, Microsoft, IBM) in adopting Atom, and I've already given up on the idea of using it across the board anyway (for better or worse). It's now 3am where I am and I've been on and off the phone all night with Andy getting ourselves in sync (we are, after all, doing the lion's share of the work). We've come to the conclusion that a simple key-value format originally proposed by ElasticHosts is feasible if supported by HTTP (for individual resources) and/or Atom (for collections of resources) for the meta-model. This is basically illustrated in the wiki<http://forge.ogf.org/sf/wiki/do/viewPage/projects.occi-wg/wiki/APIDesign>and is a significant simplification/improvement on what I had previously proposed - at least all the extra discussion has been useful. As it's key-value (links, categories, etc. are delegated to the underlying protocol(s)) we have a further optimisation of being able to use HTML forms directly - so a client need not even understand the OCCI representation(s) if it knows how to submit a form. It really doesn't get any easier than that and we get the ability to submit e.g. OVF/OVA files for free - I'm guessing (hoping) the ElasticHosts guys will be happy when they get back from their long weekend as it was their feedback that primarily drove the revision. All technical issues aside, and speaking as an outsider, I'd advise members
of this group to rally around whatever your co-chairs propose, because they're trying to get you from nowhere to somewhere. -Tim
Having worked on this project full time and then some since March I take some amount of offense to your claim that we are "nowhere", especially considering that the proposal you're supporting "as an outsider" to get "somewhere" is the adoption and rubber stamping of your own API (not forgetting that one of the two co-chairs who "strongly supports this course of action" happens to be another Sun employee). If that ends up being the case even in light of the unresolved patent problems first raised over 2 months ago then I'll be out of here quicker than you can say "vendor capture". Sam