[jsdl-wg] a couple of questions

[Michel Drescher]

Hi Ariel,

thanks for your questions, I'll try to answer some below:

On 29 Apr 2005, at 14:42, Ariel Oleksiak wrote:

> 6. I see that units and operators attributes disappeared from the 
> schema. I
> understand that operators can be expressed using RangeValueType and 
> units
> are defined in the specification now?

Yes, units have perished. Elements that define values such as, say 
jsdl:PhysicalMemory, have implicit units. In this example, 
jsdl:PhysicalMemory, the unit is simply "byte".
(Bear in mind that JSDL instance documents are supposed to be primarily 
written using some application or tool, not manually by a user, so 
"beauty" or "syntactic sugar" is not an issue.)

> 7. It is not clear for me what is the difference between Range 
> elements and
> Upper/LowerBoundedRange in the RangeValueType. Sorry if it has been 
> already
> explained elsewhere.

A jsdl:Range element always specifies intervals with its lower and 
upper boundary. The optional attribute "exclusiveBound" on the 
boundaries make them exclusive (inclusive is the default). It allows 
you to define intervals whose boundary declarations are included in the 
interval or not.

Upper/LowerBoundedRange allows to define right-open or left-open 
intervals, respectively. You simply define the lower or the upper 
boundary of the interval. The unspecified boundary is assumed to be 
positive infinity or negative infinity (effectively limited by the 
consuming system's capabilities).

This way, you can specify inclusive intervals, right-open intervals, 
left-open intervals and exclusive intervals.

> 8. I cannot find a way to specify a type of application in terms of its
> architecture (single, mpi etc.). I suppose that you consider it as too
> specific and as a possible extension or maybe this is an oversight?

Yes, that's right. JSDL expects user-defined extensions here, following 
the lead of the normative extension for POSIX applications. At a later 
stage, popular user-defined extensions may be merited to normative 
extensions in later versions of JSDL.

Cheers,
Michel