[Cosmo-dev] Sharing format questions

[Morgen Sagen]

By the way, Phillip and I have been working on an intermediate  
information model which Chandler items get mapped into prior to being  
serialized for sharing or dumping. It's an explicit Object Relational  
Mapping, turning items into rows in tables.  This wiki page sort of  
explains it:

http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/ExternalInformationModel

The idea is that Chandler developers are isolated from having to know  
anything about external formats; those developers adding new types  
(or extending existing ones) need to define:  A) the table(s)  
required to store their types' attributes, and B) two callbacks whose  
jobs are to convert items to and from those tables.

One benefit of this that completely escaped me until pje pointed it  
out to me today was that the sharing format we define *could* map  
closely to these tables and records, requiring little in the way of  
translation.  This is different than the sharing format bcm and I  
have been converging on, which is a more traditional object-based  
approach.  An example of a record-based format is at the bottom of  
the ExternalInformationModel wiki page.

I wanted to point out the possibility of using a table-centric  
sharing format could eliminate the need to convert back and forth  
between objects and tables during sharing, especially if Cosmo were  
storing things in tables internally.  Otherwise, we can continue to  
fine tune the format we've been discussing:

http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/ 
SharingFormatDiscussion#xml_example