The GNOME Virtual File System

The solution we gave to these issues in the GNOME project is in the form of a new library, designed from scratch to meet all the requirements. This library (the GNOME Virtual File System, or GNOME VFS for short) takes advantage of the existing GNOME development libraries, such as GLIB and GTK+ [GTK].

The following design ideas were kept in mind while implementing the GNOME VFS:

• Like the rest of GNOME, the API should be C-based and follow the standard GNOME programming style.
• The implementation should be portable, so that making GNOME VFS a core component of GNOME would not restrict the availabilty of GNOME on various Unix platforms.
• Using GNOME VFS should not make the programmer's life harder.
• The asynchronous API should be simple to use, and be nicely integrated with the standard GLIB main loop that is central to GNOME applications. (The GLIB main loop is the main event-handling loop in GTK+ and GNOME applications. The X main loop is nicely wrapped by the GLIB loop.)
• Adding new access methods should be possible, and programmers should not need to care about too many of the details, such as asynchronous behavior. (By ``access method'', we mean the implementation of a protocol, of a file format, or any other way to retrieve, create or modify a GNOME VFS file. For example, there should be an HTTP access method, a ZIP file access method and so on.)