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Re: [p2-dev] URLs, URIs, and IDs (oh my)
For the record, I introduced IPath into this discussion as an illustration to tease out some detail. There are many places where we simultaneously manipulate String, IPath, File and URL (often in the same method). Most of our current bugs or "quirks" come from the conversions between these forms.
Ed, for your example of the URI with a query, it likely would not make sense to use IPath. Pragmatically, there are similar disconnects using URI. In many usecases we know/expect that the location is a filesystem location and eventually do new File() so the query stuff is dropped anyway. Just saying that there are cases where the information dropping is not an issue. Given the need to interact with some legacy code, are there converters for URI to get IPaths and URLs (and the other way)?
It would be quite illuminating to see the Path test suite rewritten in terms of URI to see if all the device and canonicalization is equivalent.
Naively I see the current discussion evolving as ID vs EMF URI. Not trying to pit one against the other but rather compare and see the pros and cons. The idea of having one (URI) that is the superset of the function is attractive assuming the cost is not high. There was a point raised earlier about extensibility and URI (it was hard?) but I did not understand the jist. Can someone restate? 

Thanks
Jeff

Ed Merks wrote:

Scott,
Would IPath really be a valid way to manipulate a general URI? I.e., suppose the URI was http://www.eclipse.org/projects/project_summary.php?projectid=modeling.emf; what would be the IPath and if one asked for the getFileExtension would it return "php"? The conversions, as Jeff is pointing out, do seem very problematic to me. It would seen that conversion to the most general possible form and always manipulating via that form is the only "properly general" way. If that's a valid conclusion, it starts to argue in the direction that this most general representation perhaps ought to be the one uniformly used everywhere... 


Scott Lewis wrote:

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


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