[vos-d] vobject namespace

[Peter Amstutz]

I just wanted to float another idea for a change in s4 to s5.  
Previously in s4, there was no well defined "root" of the vobject tree.  
Or rather, there was the site root, but listing the contents of this 
root would get you every vobject on the site, which was rarely what you 
wanted.

I'm thinking that it would be useful to have a well defined root, 
similar to the unix file system root, and for vobjects on the site to be 
treated sort of like inodes.  This has a few advantages: it is simpler 
to "mount" conventional filesystems onto the VOS namespace, and it is 
easy to identify "named" (accessable via the root) and "unnamed" 
objects, and to garbage collect the latter since we found that 
long-running sites had a tendency to build up cruft in the form of 
discarded unlinked vobjects.

A vobject would now be describable as either a literal identifier like 
vos://interreality.org/$88FA3483 or with a path like 
vos://interreality.org/worlds/blocks.  The former would be used 
internally, the latter would reflect the human and programmatic layout 
of a VOS site.

VOS reflective structures would be linked as branches off the root, such 
as the list of vobject types, and sitewide configuration parameters 
(like what plugins are loaded).  So you could browse 
vos://interreality.org/types/namespaces/core to get a list of all 
vobject types present in the "core" namespace.  Or you could browse 
vos://interreality.org/etc/plugins to get a list of plugins.  This would 
be well defined so that these structures are available on any site.  

Child links would be like hard links in a Unix file system, except that 
we'll maintain the "parent" list, so you can actually tell who's 
pointing to a particular vobject.  I suppose in this scheme a hypercard 
would be like a symbolic link.

The basic model of the child list as associative list would be 
unaffected.  Also, this is extremely easy to implement, since the code 
for parsing and following paths is more or less the same either way.

[   Peter Amstutz  ][ tetron at interreality.org ][ peter.amstutz at gdit.com ]
[Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet]
[ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ]
[ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey:  pgpkeys.mit.edu  18C21DF7 ]

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