I put in quite a few hours this week slaving over a hot Wiki, and the results are reflected in a bunch of revisions to the Sun Cloud API spec.
As always, if you’re new to this, the best place to start is with the “Hello Cloud” walk-through.
Async/Status ·
The biggest changes are those discussed earlier in
Slow REST; when you
change the state of a cloud, it can take a long unpredictable time, so instead
of coming back with 200 OK or 201 Created, all
updates come back with 202 Accepted and give you a
Request Status
resource whose URI you can poll to see how things are going. ¶
There is lots of room for argument about the details, but we’re pretty convinced that this is going prove a saner programming model for people who want to build reliable cloud clients.
No More Deploys · Earlier revs of the spec had the notion that you would make a bunch of changes to your cloud config, but they wouldn’t take effect, they’d just be in your “model”; then you’d use a “deploy” operation to put them all into effect. ¶
It sounded good in theory, but people who tried to use it found it nightmarish in practice. So as of now, all the “model_status” fields and “deploy” controller URIs are gone.
This doesn’t mean that everything you do has instant effect. For example, there are a few things you can change on a Virtual Machine that won’t take effect until you rebot. Thus, the Virtual Machine model has a new field “updated” which if true says that there are changes pending.
Cloud Standards: More is Better · Which is a good thing, because are there ever a lot! Here at Sun, we’re just trying to build The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work. And remember, it’s Creative-Commmons-licensed in a way that means whoever can do whatever with it. ¶
PS: How To Edit a Wiki · When you have to make a lot of big changes, I mean. Hit “edit this page”, copy the wikitext into an Emacs buffer, do the work there, then copy it back into the Wiki. Only way to stay sane IMHO. ¶
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Ryan Wick (Aug 21 2009, at 11:55)
Very similar to your copy text to Emacs method, there's a nice Firefox extension called ViewSourceWith https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/394 that allows you to right-click and open text areas with an external editor, and then when you hit save it updates the text area with your changes.
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From: Stephen Green (Aug 21 2009, at 16:54)
Tim: It's All Text
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125
Emacsy goodness at the press of a butto.
[link]
From: Simon Wright (Aug 21 2009, at 23:32)
On Mac OS X, ViewSourceWith works fine with /usr/bin/emacsclient as the editor (with Carbon Emacs, btw).
I couldn't get Its All Text! working ...
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From: Hugh Emberson (Aug 23 2009, at 23:15)
On Mac OS X I use the following script to launch Aquamacs from "It's All Text!".
#!/bin/bash
# Helper script run by It's All Text! (the firefox extension) to launch Aquamacs.
exec /usr/bin/open -a "Aquamacs Emacs" "$@"
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