[Ndn-interest] any comments on naming convention?

Abdelzaher, Tarek zaher at illinois.EDU
Mon Sep 15 13:05:56 PDT 2014


Ok, here is a short perspective from a person who does not write network 
code, but rather builds distributed applications:

I feel squeamish about specifying naming conventions at all. I feel that 
the design should favor simplicity and should not burden application 
developers with having to understand what's better for the network. 
Hence, I would argue in favor of names that are just series of bits 
organized into substrings whose semantics are up to the application. I 
would not use any special bits/characters or other special conventions. 
I would also most definitely not embed any assumptions on name 
conventions into network-layer code.

As an application developer, I would like to be able to think about name 
spaces the way I think of UNIX file-name hierarchies. To put it 
differently, I do not want to read a tutorial on UNIX filename design 
guidelines in order to ensure that the UNIX file system does file 
caching, block management, and other functions efficiently for my 
application. I want file system plumbing to be hidden from me, the 
application developer. A good design is one that hides such plumbing 
from the application without impacting efficiency. Same applies to NDN 
in my opinion. A discussion of special delimiters, markers, etc, that 
enhances efficiency of certain network functions seems to be going in 
the opposite direction from what makes NDN general and flexible.

Tarek


On 9/14/2014 10:39 PM, Tai-Lin Chu wrote:
> hi,
> Just some questions to know how people feel about it.
> 1. Do you like it or not? why?
> 2. Does it fit the need of your application?
> 3. What might be some possible changes (or even a big redesign) if you
> are asked to purpose a naming convention?
> 4. some other thoughts
>
> Feel free to answer any of the questions.
> Thanks
>
>
> [1] http://named-data.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ndn-tr-22-ndn-memo-naming-conventions.pdf
> _______________________________________________
> Ndn-interest mailing list
> Ndn-interest at lists.cs.ucla.edu
> http://www.lists.cs.ucla.edu/mailman/listinfo/ndn-interest




More information about the Ndn-interest mailing list