[regrep] New Proposal: User Defined Objects

[Farrukh Najmi <Farrukh.Najmi@Sun.COM>]

Team,

Below is a first attempt to describe a new proposal for V3.

The current RIM allows for attribute extensibility but not object type
extensibility.
This means that if someone wants to use teh registry for storing
specialized fine
graned meta-data, they have to store each datum as an ExtrinsicObject/
repository item pair.
This is very inefficient. Imagine an application that uses the registry
to as a place to keep
a shared issue list (Nikola's idea). Each issue would be an
ExtrinsicObject/repository item.

The proposal, enables a new class in RIM called UserDefinedObject which
is a sub-class
of RegistryObject. A UserDefinedObject has an attribute named className
of type String.
In case of Nikola's example the user would create an instance of a
UserDefinedType with
className of "Issue". They would then add slots defined for the Issues
class (e.g. "issueNumber",
"submitter", "submissonDate", "status" etc.).

The result is that the issues can be stored as light-weight user defined
metadata instead
of extrinsicobject/repository items pairs.

I believe that this proposal if implemented would increase the utility
and useability of our registry
in a significant way.

--
Regards,
Farrukh