[Swift-devel] First tests with swift faster

[Mihael Hategan]

On Wed, 2013-02-20 at 22:44 -0600, Michael Wilde wrote:
> > > I want to get to the point where most users never type XML to use
> > > Swift, and the way to that is gensites, which should be coorinated
> > > with this change.
> > 
> > This is an opportunity to deal with the issue. Perhaps a better
> > configuration format might be the better choice.
> 
> Should we consider a simpler name/value format and eliminate XML here? A site could pretty much be defined by a single level set of name=value pairs.

Possibly. We do have to describe hierarchical information 
(site->(properties->sub-properties, apps->properties)), so the questions
is whether name=value pairs will do the trick for that.

> 
> Basically make the input to gensites the actual format instead of requiring another layer?

Iff the input to gensites can fully describe the site "space", then yes.
If not, then probably not.

> 
> I should also mention that what goes on *inside* the Java code is
> similarly complex.  Understanding how attributes go from sites.xml and
> swift.properties through the various config layers, especially with
> Coasters involved, has been a barrier to many developers, debugging
> efforts, and improvements.  Im not sure the two are that closely
> related, but while we're working in the neighborhood, might want to
> consider some improvement (and documentation) as well.  I think Justin
> took a first crack at documenting the config conventions, but Im not
> sure where that went.

I think we're trying to abstract things away. In the same spirit that
you don't really think about how CPU registers are assigned when you
write some C program, you also shouldn't think about how exactly
coasters are starring jobs.

Mihael