[occi-wg] moving forward

[Sam Johnston]

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 3:04 AM, Tim Bray <Tim.Bray at sun.com> wrote:

> On May 26, 2009, at 5:48 PM, Sam Johnston wrote:
>
>  <XXX, doesn't matter what> isn't going to work and is a huge step
>> backwards from where we are now anyway.
>>
>
> Where are you now anyway?  Facing a glaring lack of consensus on pretty
> well everything.   I'd be careful about characterizing anything as a step
> back.
>

Actually the only thing we *don't* have consensus on is whether or not to
follow the leaders (Google, Microsoft, IBM) in adopting Atom, and I've
already given up on the idea of using it across the board anyway (for better
or worse).

It's now 3am where I am and I've been on and off the phone all night with
Andy getting ourselves in sync (we are, after all, doing the lion's share of
the work). We've come to the conclusion that a simple key-value format
originally proposed by ElasticHosts is feasible if supported by HTTP (for
individual resources) and/or Atom (for collections of resources) for the
meta-model. This is basically illustrated in the
wiki<http://forge.ogf.org/sf/wiki/do/viewPage/projects.occi-wg/wiki/APIDesign>and
is a significant simplification/improvement on what I had previously
proposed - at least all the extra discussion has been useful.

As it's key-value (links, categories, etc. are delegated to the underlying
protocol(s)) we have a further optimisation of being able to use HTML forms
directly - so a client need not even understand the OCCI representation(s)
if it knows how to submit a form. It really doesn't get any easier than that
and we get the ability to submit e.g. OVF/OVA files for free - I'm guessing
(hoping) the ElasticHosts guys will be happy when they get back from their
long weekend as it was their feedback that primarily drove the revision.

All technical issues aside, and speaking as an outsider, I'd advise members
> of this group to rally around whatever your co-chairs propose, because
> they're trying to get you from nowhere to somewhere.  -Tim
>

Having worked on this project full time and then some since March I take
some amount of offense to your claim that we are "nowhere", especially
considering that the proposal you're supporting "as an outsider" to get
"somewhere" is the adoption and rubber stamping of your own API (not
forgetting that one of the two co-chairs who "strongly supports this course
of action" happens to be another Sun employee). If that ends up being the
case even in light of the unresolved patent problems first raised over 2
months ago then I'll be out of here quicker than you can say "vendor
capture".

Sam
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