This Draft Recommendation document has been published as GFD #087: Title: ByteIO Specification 1.0 Author/editor: M. Morgan Please visit this link to download it: http://www.ogf.org/gf/docs/?final Abstract: The ByteIO Specification is a description of a set of port types that give users a concise, standard way of interacting with bulk data sources and sinks in the grid. The purpose of these port types is to provide the means for treating such data resources as POSIX-like files. At the same time, clients will be able to leverage these port types to provide users with a convenient way of interacting with these grid resources. The purpose of this specification is to address a common case and common requirement in the grid community. Other applications may choose to provide more application specific interfaces for accessing and modifying bulk data in their own resource endpoints, however it is hoped that they will choose to additionally support ByteIO as a means of providing a common interface to which arbitrary clients can speak. ByteIO is divided into two port types and each addresses a unique set of use cases. The first of these port types supports the notion that a data resource is directly accessible and that clients can handle the maintenance of any session state (such as file pointer, buffering, caching, etc.). The other port type presents a more stream-like interface to clients and as such contains implicit session state. In this latter case data resources with this port type donât represent that bulk data source/sink directly but rather represent the resource of the open stream between the client and the data source/sink. Thanks to the authors/editors for work on this document. -- Greg Newby, OGF Editor