openstack team mailing list archive

[Bryan Taylor <btaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jun 4, 2011, at 9:14 AM, "Ed Leafe" <ed.leafe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Jun 3, 2011, at 1:13 PM, Bryan Taylor wrote:
> 
>> We've standardized on XML for backend work. We aren't spending much time debugging serialization issues and are pretty happy with our decision and aren't likly to change any time soon

Our choice, for "backend" work, as one  example of an openstack customer. 

>    vs.
> 
>> So the obvious thing to do is support both JSON and XML, which isn't that hard.

A product feature choice as a platform provider who has to support a community. 

> 
>    I'm always confused when people claim that doing something is easy, but also that for them to do the same thing is too hard.

 Our internal policy is actually that XML is mandatory and other formats are allowed and driven by customer request. I never said it was too hard for us to support both, and when we look at the needs of the community of developers - we see a vastly different layout than openstack does, with  a much smaller set of people. BTW, we ironically followed the Rackspace Cloud architecture team's recommendation as cloud is the only major external integrator with us. 

We just signed a major contract with a SaaS vendor whose product will become one of the pillars that runs Rackspace. They earned big points in the integration category vs their competition because they uniformly output XML, JSON, CSV, XLS via http and SOAP for each API. 

>> at the point they try to tell me how to implement my solutions, all it does is annoy me, because format wars are annoying.
> 
>    I'm not sure if you intended it, but dismissing a discussion about taking on a significant chunk of work as nothing more than an annoying "format war" sounds rather condescending. We're not arguing the merits of of one over the other; we're deciding if we are going to commit to supporting XML right now, or perhaps add it later on.

Ask the customers. This is a product feature - the question is demand vs difficulty. Think of this decision the same way we decide what OS's to support.

And several posts (none from you) have approached it by touting technical merits. There are certain religious area: OS, language, xml vs json where tech merit discussions are just going to result in endless soul sucking debate. 

>    Everyone would love to support as many formats as possible. With limited resources, we need to narrow our focus. And since this is all open source, anyone who has a need and finds implementing the solution for that need isn't "that hard" is more than welcome to contribute.

I wonder what your stance would be on a contribution that was XML only. Mine would be the same - the feature isn't ready for inclusion in a release until it is finished by meeting the API standards of supporting both. 

I'm pushing for more involvement by our devs in openstack, btw. As we scratch our own itches as customers i have no problem expecting our contributions to meet openstack coding standards. But before this happens we go through the process of deciding to deploy openstack components, and components that speak XML are attractive to us. Other customers prefer JSON and I'd like a big tent where we all collaborate.

> 
> -- Ed Leafe
>