[occi-wg] Is OCCI the HTTP of Cloud Computing?

[Tim Bray]

On May 6, 2009, at 6:37 AM, Sam Johnston wrote:

> Au contraire, we are paying *very* close attention to the Sun Cloud  
> APIs and originally wanted to draw from them heavily were it not for  
> a disagreement with the OGF powers that be over Creative Commons  
> licensing.

Huh?  I find this hard to understand. Could you explain?

> Sun's decision to use JSON no doubt stems from the fact that the API  
> was previously consumed almost exclusively by the Q-Layer web  
> interface

No.  We started with XML and decided that JSON was a superior choice.

> Oh and we are not at all wedded to OAuth - any HTTP authentication  
> mechanism will do (though it may make sense for us to limit this  
> somewhat for interoperability).

Actually, one of the nice things about using HTTP is that it allows  
you to do like AtomPub did and say "Use whatever you want as long as  
it's as strong as TLS", and let the (rich and growing) web-security  
marketplace sort it out.

> So why go for angle brackets (XML) over curly braces (JSON) given  
> most of the action is going on in the latter camp? In addition to  
> the reasons given above, Google. That is, if we essentially rubber  
> stamp GData (a well proven protocol) in the form of OCCI core

GData is all about CRUD.  The reason this cloud stuff is interesting  
is that it has lots of non-CRUD stuff in it.   Maybe I'm missing  
something, but the code around GData seems to live in a different  
universe from the one where cloud infrastructure lives.

  -Tim
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