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

[Tim Bray]

On May 6, 2009, at 1:44 PM, Alexis Richardson wrote:

>   Failure is a possibility and for this reason
> we have set ourselves a very tight schedule so that if we fail we can
> fail fast and the interoperability community can learn from our
> findings.

FWIW, I've never seen a non-trivial language/protocol/API/standard/ 
whatever designed in less than a year, elapsed.

>> We are going to run with our CC-licensed REST API ...  There are  
>> other parties also experimenting with
>> using it as a front-end to various cloud-computing services.
>
> Cool - can you or they contribute some use cases please?   We needs
> dem use cases :-)

Good point.  We have internal ones, had actually never thought of  
publishing them.  I'll see what I can do.

>>  They do not rely on interoperable models,
>> they rely on agreement on what bytes I send you and what bytes you
>> send me and what the meanings of the fields are.  ....
>
> That sounds like a protocol mindset - consistent with your RFC comment
> above.  But is OCCI a protocol?  Or is it an API?  What are your
> thoughts here?

I don't understand the difference, to be honest.

The problem is that when you say API people expect object models and  
methods, and history should have taught us that those are very  
difficult to make portable across networks.  I confess to having a  
protocol mindset since I'm a Web guy.

> More generally: What is the right way to make a cloud interface more
> like a protocol?

My opinion: Be RESTful, to the extent possible.

> How would you recommend we deal with cases where XML is well supported
> but JSON is not well known?
>
> * .NET
> * Many 'enterprises'

Hmm... if you're in Java or Python or Ruby or of course JavaScript,  
it's super-easy to consume and generate JSON.  If C# & friends are  
behind in this respect I can't see it staying that way for very long,  
my impression is that those guys are serious about keeping up with the  
joneses.

> If we 'went with JSON' then would it be plausible to have XML adaptors
> for non-JSON settings?

Specifying the mapping is extra work.  I suggest that YAGNI.

> What about plain text - any view on that?

Well, in our API, it turned out that the things we wanted to send back  
and forth were numbers, labels, lists and hashes.  Without exception.   
JSON had everything we needed built-in and nothing we didn't need.

> Do you think Atom is a bad thing for our use cases?

I'm not sure; I enumerated the things that I think would make Atom  
attractive.  For our use cases in the Sun API, it didn't seem like a  
terribly good match.

  -Tim