For anyone else wondering what this API is about: It generates a (random) UUID. According to Wikipedia "the intent of UUIDs is to enable distributed systems to

For anyone else wondering what this API is about: It generates a (random) UUID. According to Wikipedia "the intent of UUIDs is to enable distributed systems to uniquely identify information without significant central coordination. In this context the word unique should be taken to mean "practically unique" rather than "guaranteed unique". Since the identifiers have a finite size it is possible for two differing items to share the same identifier. The identifier size and generation process need to be selected so as to make this sufficiently improbable in practice. Anyone can create a UUID and use it to identify something with reasonable confidence that the same identifier will never be unintentionally created by anyone to identify something else. Information labeled with UUIDs can therefore be later combined into a single database without needing to resolve identifier (ID) conflicts. One widespread use of this standard is in Microsoft's globally unique identifiers (GUIDs). Other significant uses include ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem UUIDs, LUKS encrypted partitions, GNOME, KDE, and Mac OS X, all of which use implementations derived from the uuid library found in the e2fsprogs package." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier