On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 7:34 AM, Tim Bray <Tim.Bray@sun.com> wrote:
On May 11, 2009, at 1:54 PM, Sam Johnston wrote:

The ideal core protocol would contain no references to infrastructure, rather allow manipulation of resources (CRUD, linking, actuators) irrespective of what the resource was. It would thus be reusable for any resource (as Google have done for 16 different services and who knows how many different resource types already with GData).

Odd though it may seem, until I saw this I didn't grok what Sam was proposing.  Maybe I still don't, but let me take a guess:

It's quite possible I've not done a good enough job of explaining myself until now...
 
You're focusing not so much Atom the RFC4287 data format, but AtomPub  the RFC5023 publishing protocol as implemented notably in GData and lots of other places, and do generic Web-resource CRUD where the resources happen to represent cloud infrastructure objects.  Thus you outsource most of the work of CRUD specification.  Then, you layer cloud-specific stuff on top of that.  Then collections of servers and clusters and networks and so on are perforce represented as Atom Feeds.

Is that the essence of it?  -Tim

Essentially, yes - at least a subset of it (I'm not sure that service and category documents are supported nor required by GData to date) with simple extensions for querying, concurrency/performance and any other implementation issues we come across on the way. I've been focusing on Atom because that's how the data is rendered - AtomPub as you well know tells us how to discover and manipulate the Atom resources on the server.

Sam