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Replies:
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Last Post:
Sep 20, 2005 4:04 PM
by: ochkarik
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FS extended attributes and FS notifications in Java.
Posted:
Sep 19, 2005 2:21 PM
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Hi all,
There exists a class of problems that cannot be given a scalable solution with current J2SE. These include, for example, an enterprise file management solution, and a desktop search engine.
Imagine we have to develop a web-based interface for file uploading, with metadata storage (author, public/private flag, category, keywords), and with concurrent access to the file repository as a regular filesystem, for further categorization, renaming/moving, sorting, FTP access (important!). Due to missing filesystem extended attributes and filesystem notification support, a J2SE solution is going to be extremely inefficient. (I'm going to explain this further if there is an interest.)
Or, look at Beagle (http://www.beaglewiki.org/Main_Page). This desktop search engine, written in C#, makes extensive use of both Linux EAs and inotify.
I'll have to develop a minimal JNI bindings to POSIX EAs and SGI FAM and/or dnotify/inotify. I suppose there can be a community interest of including those features in Mustang (or maybe in Java 7.0). Please give me a tip where to look further, or, if this is not a correct place for making proposals like that, whom and where do I have to contact for collaboration.
Thank you!
Dimitri
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Re: FS extended attributes and FS notifications in Java.
Posted:
Sep 20, 2005 6:49 AM
in response to: ochkarik
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This is a good (or maybe bad) timing. I've just taken over JSR-203 and will be spinning it up very shortly. One of its goals is to define a new file system interface. As you have identified the current API (essentially java.io.File) only provides very limited access to file attributes. This means that applications currently have to resort to native code to do anything with EAs. File change notification is also very important and a number of file systems now provide some sort of notification mechanism. The goal for JSR-203 is to be ready in good time for Dolphin (Java SE 7.0). This might be too late for what you want to do but worth keeping in mind - maybe you can structure things so that it won't be to difficult to migrate in the future.
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Thank you very much for your response.
