AW: [mb-devel] [WebService] Question about entity IDs and Listproperties

[Patrick Ruhkopf]

Hi,

> first of all, it's great that MB is finally getting a Java web service
> client :)

I really hope so. My time is limited, so if someone wants to help out, don't
hesitate to contact me. :)

[...]
> This is to allow for extensibility on the MMD level, see [1]. This way
> we could also use external IDs (from other vendors) and there's still no
> special case in the parser because it always rewrites the abbreviated
> MusicBrainz URIs to absolute URIs, too.

Thanks Matthias - that makes perfectly sense. I should have finished reading
the article. ;)

[...]
> I agree that we could model this using extensions, but since offset and
> count are already in use and documented in the spec, I'd suggest to
> stick with them. Anything else would just cause confusion.

I can't really comment on this, since I am new to the MB XML format, but
anyway, here are my thoughts: I noticed that the score attribute also
belongs to the ext namespace. So putting the count and offset would
definitively make sense as they all belong more or less to Lucene. On the
other hand, like you've said, this could cause confusion (especially for
people who are already using the service). And also count and offset are
more important because you can't rely on the number of elements returned to
get the count whereas the score imho isn't that important...it feels more
like an extension...

Best regards
Patrick Ruhkopf