What is a TUBE?

A tube is a text file that contains information about a collection of items, along with the list of items itself.

The main information stored includes:

• UUID – A universally unique ID

• Canonical Home – A URL which can be used to track the “original” version of a tube

• Creation TimeStamp – UTC formatted date time

• Description

• Item List Count

• Item List

• Rule Sets

Each Item has the following:

• File name (including path on host system)

• Item UUID

• Sorting index

• Creation date

• Link to previous versions if any

• Link to future versions if any

• Size

• Cryptographic checksum

Items can contain a lot of things, but NOT their own rule sets... if you need to do this, put tubes inside of tubes. (Recursion, ain’t it fun?)

The evolution of the Tube container

Here is a typical MS-DOS list of files in a folder (in this case, the example folder)

02/27/2009  04:17 PM           400,345 2 Trees in Chicago.jpg
04/09/2010  02:56 PM           739,231 Bean02_F01_Crop.jpg
03/31/2009  10:10 PM         1,268,434 Chicago Theater.jpg
02/12/2009  01:15 PM         1,114,464 Marshall Fields Clock.jpg
07/17/2008  04:22 PM           485,158 Warot_Mike_RailroadSignals_2008.jpg

As you can see, it gives the relevant details for a set of photographs, including date and time stamp, file size in bytes and the name of the file.

Now, that alone is insufficient for our purposes because there is no path information and no URL to make it universally accessible.

A first pass at it might be something like

TUBE
  Version=1.0
  URL=http://intertubes.org/example/
  UUID=Some_Real_UUID_String_Here
  PublicKey=A_Real_PGP_Key_Here
  Owner=mike@warot.com
  ITEM
    TIMESTAMP=200902271617
    SIZE=400345
    NAME=2 Trees in Chicago.jpg
  ITEM
    TIMESTAMP=201004091456
    SIZE=739231
    Name=Bean02_F01_Crop.jpg
  ITEM
    TIMESTAMP=200903312210
    SIZE=1268434
    NAME=Chicago Theater.jpg
  ITEM
    TIMESTAMP=200902121315
    SIZE=1114464
    NAME=Marshall Fields Clock.jpg
  ITEM
    TIMESTAMP=200807171622
    SIZE=485158
    NAME=Warot_Mike_RailroadSignals_2008.jpg
  SERVICE
    NAME=Thumbnail_Service_1.0
    CLASS=Derived
    URL=http://intertubes.org/services/thumbnail.php
  SERVICE
    NAME=Sharing_Service_1.0
    CLASS=Sharing
    URL=http://intertubes.org/services/sharing1.php
ENDTUBE

Services are the connectors which make things work

The thumbnail service would be able to create thumbnails or other scaled images of the items in the stream. The items produced by this service are derivative, and not equivalent to the original items, thus you would not want to sync them back. (But their metadata would still be synced)

The sharing service would allow others to make their own clones of the tube and sync there metadata back, based on their preferences and capabilities tokens. Replacing an image of a replica could be synced back, depending on preferences and capabilities tokens.