On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 12:40:41PM +0100, Mark Overmeer wrote: > We should focus on OS abstraction.
> [...] the design of this needs to be free from historical mistakes. And avoid making too many new ones. There must be useful prior art around. Java, for example, has a FileSystem abstraction java.nio.file.FileSystem http://openjdk.java.net/projects/nio/javadoc/java/nio/file/FileSystem.html which has been extended, based on leasons learnt, in the NIO.2 project ("JSR 203: More New I/O APIs for the JavaTM Platform ("NIO.2") APIs for filesystem access, scalable asynchronous I/O operations, socket-channel binding and configuration, and multicast datagrams.") which enables things like being able to transparently treat a zip file as a filesystem: http://blogs.sun.com/rajendrag/entry/zip_file_system_provider_implementation See http://javanio.info/filearea/nioserver/WhatsNewNIO2.pdf Tim. p.s. I didn't know any of that when I started to write this "look for prior art" email, but a little searching turned up these examples. I'm sure there are more in other realms, but NIO.2 certainly looks like a rich source of good ideas derived from a wide range of experience.
