Re: [p2-dev] URLs, URIs, and IDs (oh my)

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jeff,

Some more thoughts about this.

Jeff McAffer wrote:
> <stuff deleted>
>
> Many of the usecases don't really involve ECF at all (parish the 
> thought :-).  In the broader Equinox/Eclipse context what we need is 
> generic, handy and effcinet ways of manipulating path-like 
> structures.  Sometimes they are for files, sometimes URL-like things, 
> ...   The real challenge in this space is in encoding and all the 
> UNC/platform whackiness and the conversion between the different forms 
> (e.g., new URL(<unc string>).getPath() does not give you what yoy 
> might hope for).
> How do you see IDs fitting in? Would the adapter facility allow people 
> to convert between the different forms?

Yes, it would.  So I would envision something like this

Let's suppose some new ID namespaces are created...based upon/using URL, 
File, EMF URI, java.net URI.

So then client would call:

ID theID = <created externally>
IPath p = (IPath) theID.getAdapter(IPath.class);
foo(p);

This involves no changes to any existing interfaces...just namespace 
extensions that know how to operate on Strings, emf URI, etc to return 
an IPath. 

We didn't/haven't been using path manipulation as our driving use case 
up to now...rather we've got adapters like IFileID, IChatID, etc 
implemented by our namespace extensions.  But especially given the 
existence of good implementations for URI (e.g. emf), IPath (i.e. 
core.Path), etc.  the technical effort to provide such implementations 
doesn't seem large to me for such use cases.

Scott