Read me first

This project is licensed under both LGPLv3 and ASL 2.0. See file LICENSE for more details.

What this is

This is a package designed to ease the creation of custom Java 7 FileSystems.

Versions

The current version is 0.0.1. It is published on Maven. You can even see the (poor) javadoc online.

Beware however that the...

Status

BETA. You can start and work on it to develop your own filesystems (one is implemented already and works, but the javadoc (and the documentation in general) is very scarce at this point.

If you have questions:

• I am idletask on Freenode, channel ##java; or
• I regularly lurk in chatroom Java on Stack Overflow.

So, what is a "Java 7 FileSystem" anyway?

More generally, we are talking here about the java.nio.file API which made its appearance in Java 7.

A FileSystem can be, in theory, written for anything which has a filesystem-like structure or for which you can emulate one; the JRE of course provides it for the native filesystems of the platform you are running the JRE on, but it also provides a FileSystem view for ZIP files -- yes, that's right, you can view a ZIP file (therefore also jars) as FileSystems and copy from/to them, etc.

Other examples of existing, third party filesystems are:

• a FileSystem over FTP (by yours truly);
• an in-memory FileSystem (by Google).
• a FileSystem over DropBox (by yours truly; based on this package);

So, why this package?

Well, the API is quite a beast; if you want to program a FileSystem from scratch, you're setting yourself a very, very big task. Just look how many methods are defined by Path, for instance -- and that's only the "user level" view of the API.

This package therefore brings facilities to allow you to develop custom file systems in a much easier way; see the wiki for more information.

THIS IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS. At the moment there is only one implementation over this package but more are to come -- the next target is box.com, and Amazon S3 after that.

NOTE: JDK/JRE restrictions

You must use either the JDK provided by Oracle or OpenJDK for compilation, and an Oracle/OpenJDK JRE to run. At this moment, this package depends on a package in... sun.nio.fs. More precisely, it depends on it for generating patterns suitable for use in a glob PathMatcher.