[occi-wg] Incorporating units into OCCI

[Andre Merzky]

Quoting [Ian Stokes-Rees] (May 26 2009):
> 
> Andre Merzky wrote:
>
>> Oh well...  - you can't make everybody happy.  At the end
>> one needs to decide on one of the options, and either way,
>> just getting rid of units (by defining them as fixed) seems
>> like a good solution.  As others stated: a UI can always
>> represent a more suitable version...
> 
> We work in different domains, clearly.  For me, and the work I've done 
> full time for the past 7 years, and hundreds of other people doing grid 
> computing (which I am definitely saying is different from the 
> requirements of cloud computing folks) there is a lot of manual creation 
> of descriptor files, so "raw" data useability in terms of creation and 
> in terms of readability is an important factor.

Oh my, not another religious war! ;-)

Yes, appearently very different communities.  If I propose
to our users to write raw XML, I get laughed at.  If that...


> It would not be unreasonable to have a "basic" and "advanced" profile 
> for properties, where basic use a fixed/unitary unit, while "advanced" 
> use a type/scale modifier for the units, or support unit conversion.

Fine with me.  You would not even need to profile that,
really - can well be part of the initial specification.


> Designing a standard so it is easy to write JavaScript web pages for it 
> doesn't seem like it should be a dominant concern.

Uhm, I must have missed something, my apologies.  I was not
refering to JavaScript web pages.  I was talking about UI -
that can be high level APIs (which is what I personally am
interested in), or command line tools, GUIs, higher level
services, whatever...  It holds though, IMHO, that if you
have any layer between OCCI and humans, unit conversion is
trivial.


> Anyway, I only chimed in because someone asked about application of 
> units to some of the properties.

Appreciated.  I also only chimed in to give some feedback to
proposals on the list.  That is how it works... :-)

Thanks, Andre.


> Ian



-- 
Nothing is ever easy.