Welcome to 

Introduction

The Plastic Project Proposal is a great place to get the five minute read of what Plastic is and why you might want to consider using it. A portion of that content is repeated below.

What is a mapping problem?

• Occurs in internals of a system behind endpoints
• ODL context – moving from northbound to southbound representations
• Sometimes need to trivially convert data representation
• JSON, XML, YML, other parse-able formats
• Sometimes need to change abstractions (1:1, N:1, N:N)
• Morph one model into completely different model
• Morph N models into one model

ODL/plastic Advantages

• Pay-as-you-go for complexity (field deployable changes)
• Declarative representations are emphasized (clear schemas)
• Translation-by-intent (say what you want, not how to do it)
• Deeper levels of abstraction to help keep custom logic schema-independence
• Can specify arbitrary morphing via plug-ins in JVM language
• Understands breaking large mapping problems up (both time and space) into small chunks

Solves problems like…

• Schema changes for device configurations across releases
• No more hard-wired dependency on vendor libraries
• In-the-field updating to support multiple versions of devices
• Light weight specifications avoid religiosity around “DRY"