dwinslow wrote a very good blog post about this which deserves a read: http://www.openplans.org/projects/opencore/blog/2007/12/05/openplans-related-rambling/

Nick

On Dec 6, 2007, at 10:36 AM, whit wrote:



On Dec 6, 2007 9:28 AM, David Turner <novalis@openplans.org> wrote:
On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 20:23 -0500, whit wrote:
> we might consider better ids to identify projects and people to
> communicate between apps.
>
> both projects and people already have uids associated with them, it
> would avoid certain problems by using them.  Currently I'm thinking of
> project deletion or incomplete project creation where lingering
> instances of the id create issue when someone tries to use that id
> again.

What kind of UID?

Do you mean a random number?  If so, I'm -1 on that.

Random numbers are really nice inside a monolithic system, because you
can always resolve them back to what they refer to.  But in a
distributed system, it can be a hassle to figure out why you're seeing
152352-134214-412 when you expect 912334-613412-678.  I would rather see
URLs as ids, since they're still unique, but they're easy to understand.

urls are not unique in time (ala the scenario I suggested initially). iow, they can be filled by in. 

readability definitely does matter, but for CRUD operations, I would put avoiding collisions over readable ids. 

-w

 



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| david "whit" morriss
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Nick Grossman
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