[occi-wg] name-based access to resources

[Adrian Cole]

Hello, WG.

In re-reading the OCCI spec, something became clear to me I frankly
hadn't noticed before:  All operations require system-generated ids.
POST creates an object and returns a url containing its UUID.  All
other operations require this UUID.  UUIDs are important, and there
will be systems that should use this for efficiency's sake.  However,
moderate use would pretty much require users to store a mapping
between what they call a resource and its UUID.  This mapping would
end up as another table or cache that clients would need to maintain.

The alternate path is a name-based interface to the system that allows
access to resources based on ids the client decides.  A good example
of this is atmos online, where they have 2 interfaces: /objects and
/namespace but offer the same methods on each.  For convenience,
namespace methods return the UUID in a response header, so one can
later switch.  Regardless, clients do not need to parse metadata or
listings to access their resources as they are available by their
natural names.

Is this something we can consider supporting in OCCI?

Regards,
-Adrian
jclouds