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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.)
Next: Extended URIs
Up: Unix file system extensions
Previous: KDE's kio
Ettore Perazzoli
2000-04-26