I have been spending some time now on the VFS layer... Nothing major to report yet, but I just wanted to sound off so that if I am going down the wrong route, I correct it right away.
I evaluated at WebNFS, NetBeansFS (NBFS) and JNDI. 1. WebNFS seems to be going nowhere. It has been dormant for quite sometime now. Licensing is rigid. Technically, it doesn't look so bad as it closely replicates java.io.File's API. But then, that really gives us very little. 2. NBFS looks OK. It has got a few filesystems already built. There may be some licensing issues, I don't know, but that shouldn't concern us too much as, according to Peter, it is Mozilla (I haven't really check the license out, sorry). But, as far as I can see, it seems to lack in sophisticated API features like searching based on attributes, etc., which we will definitely be needing for the Selector APIs. 3. JNDI, by far, beats the above to, in my evaluation. It is generic enough. We don't have any licensing issues. It has also become part of the core JRE (1.4 onwards). Technically, it fits to a T what we are looking for - virtual file system that provides search controls, access attributes, url mounting, etc. Furthermore, there's been some ground work already done for us at Jakarta/Apache (Catalina). I have written a SPI for a FTPFileSystem - though it is in a real crude stage right now. I believe this is the way to go because Ant's code would be operating at the (Dir)Context level and we can keep adding SPIs as we need them. Furthermore, JNDI has been stable for quite sometime now and we can depend on a widely used API. I don't think JNDI is a heavyweight API for our needs. It seems to be the only one, so far, which encompasses at the APIP level, all the new functionalities that we desire to introduce. Let me know if my approach, so far, to go the JNDI route seems reasonable. Cheers, Magesh -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
