[MOBY-dev] Primitives as primary input

[Paul Gordon]

Hi all,

I believe, for reasons that I've outlined before, that namespace 
inheritance is generally a very bad idea.  I can see what Tom and 
Andreas are getting in terms of practicality of protocol + content type 
specification, but strongly stand by the fact that the 
protocol/namespace equivalence should be the mechanism in Moby.  Now the 
question is how to combine the namespace and the data type in a service 
signature if that service is a retrieval service.  The VirtualPNGImage 
method is currently the only way, but the Virtual idea is usable for any 
object.  So we'd need to be able to add an attribute saying "I'm 
virtual".  e.g.

<PNGImage namespace="http" id="//google.com/images.foo.png" virtual="yes"/>

And we'd have to add to the service signature a mechanism for saying 
"I'll accept a PNGImage, or a virtual one that is in the http, ftp or 
scp namespaces".  Of course, by default, a service will only accept real 
objects as they do know.  You'd have explicitly register the fact that 
you take virtual data.

My $0.02

Paul