[Registry-dev] Wiki page for Registry protocol

[Jonathan Marsh]

The ; reinforces the distinction between resources (path segments) and
metadata about those resources.  The primary difference IMO is that
resources are versioned and metadata isn't.  This is a fairly arbitrary
choice (attributes vs. elements all over again).  We could have gone down
the road that everything is a resource and had a consistent design, and that
would reflect well in the path hierarchy as using / everywhere.  However we
aren't going down that path so "/" isn't quite as attractive.  In a way,
overusing / could reinforce misperceptions about what's a resource and
what's not.

I had an earlier proposal on adding version identifiers - but it hasn't made
it into the wiki.  Dealing with version identifiers may shed some additional
light on the distinction between resources and metadata, or lack of it.  My
proposal used ;v{n} but that blurs the metadata/resource distinction as
well. 

In MV I preferred using ? to access metadata, but Glen was worried (rightly
I think) about "reserving" query strings on resources if we did that.


Jonathan Marsh - http://www.wso2.com - http://auburnmarshes.spaces.live.com
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: registry-dev-bounces at wso2.org [mailto:registry-dev-
> bounces at wso2.org] On Behalf Of Sanjiva Weerawarana
> Sent: Sunday, November 25, 2007 3:06 AM
> To: registry-dev at wso2.org
> Subject: Re: [Registry-dev] Wiki page for Registry protocol
> 
> Glen Daniels wrote:
> >
> > Before we do that, I'd like to do the research to make sure that ";"
> > really is a problem - IIRC the issue with it was that some proxies
> have
> > a problem with it?  I very much like the compromises we came up with
> in
> > Mountain View, I think they look clean and make sense, and I'm loath
> to
> > give them up just yet.  IMHO, using slash gives the wrong message
> ("it's
> > just part of the hierarchy", for one - and also that non-directory
> > resources have sub-resources) for "our" metadata.
> 
> Well the advantage of treating our stuff as sub-resources is that at
> one
> level that's consistent with our notion of resources as we're
> effectively
> making every resource (even leaf nodes from the user perspective) into
> collections which have other resources (tags, comments, properties).
> 
> >> Tags would then be /users/[username]/$tags.
> >
> > That doesn't strike you as bizarre?
> >
> > What is the gain of that over something like users/[name]$tags?
> 
> Well .. what tipped me in this direction is the idea that in fact we
> will
> have hierarchy beyond our special marker. That is, if we never have a
> "/"
> after $foo or ;foo then I'd be ok with it. But
> users/glen;properties/foo
> looks really bizarre to me- worse than users/glen/$properties/foo.
> 
> I agree neither is perfect :-).
> 
> Sanjiva.
> --
> Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph.D.
> Founder, Chairman & CEO; WSO2, Inc.; http://www.wso2.com/
> email: sanjiva at wso2.com; cell: +1 650 265 8311 | +94 77 787 6880
> 
> "Oxygenating the Web Service Platform."
> 
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