Glossary#

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ABNF

The Augmented BNF (ABNF) format is a plain-text (non-XML) representation, which is similar to a traditional BNF (Backus-Naur Form) grammar, and is used as a bidirectional communications protocol.

image

A collection of files for a specific operating system (OS) that you use to create or rebuild a server. Rackspace provides pre-built images. You can also create custom images from servers that you have launched. Custom images can be used for data backups or as “gold” images for additional servers. In the Rackspace Cloud Images service, an image is represented by a JSON-encoded data structure (the image schema) and its raw binary data (the image file).

Image Member

An image member is a user who has been granted access to an image. Normally, if an image is not public, only the owner can boot from the image.

Image Tag

An image tag is a string of characters used to identify a specific image or images.

Image Task

An image task is a resource that allows you to perform an asynchronous image-related operations such as importing or exporting images. The task resource may be polled to determine the status of the import or export operation, and the resource is deleted at a set time identified by the expires-at parameter.

JSON

Javascript Object Notation, json, is an open standard format that uses human-readable text to transmit data objects consisting of key:value pairs. The following json example might be used to represent an object that describes a person: `` { “firstname”: “John”, “lastname”: “Smith”, “age”: 25 } ``

JSON Pointer

A JSON Pointer defines a syntax for identifying a specific value within a JSON document. A restricted JSON pointer is a Unicode string containing a sequence of exactly one reference token, prefixed by a ‘/’ (%x2F) character. Each reference token is a sequence of unreserved and/or percent-encoded characters.

Media type

An Internet media type is a standard identifier used on the Internet to indicate the type of data contained in a file. A media type is composed of a type, a subtype, and zero or more optional parameters. For example, an HTML file might be designated text/html; charset=UTF-8

Schema

Some Rackspace APIs supply json documents describing the JSON-encoded data structures that represent domain objects, so that a client knows exactly what to expect in an API response.

URI

A uniform resource identifier (URI) is a string of characters used to identify the name of a web resource. The URI syntax consists of a URI scheme name (such as “HTTP”, “FTP”, or “file”) followed by a colon character, and then by a scheme-specific part (which varies depending on the context).

UUID

A universal unique identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit that is used to uniquely identify an object on the internet.