ClawIO works with objects. An object can be a tree or a blob. This terminology comes from Git internal data model.
- A blob object is the the binary representation of some information.
- A tree object is a container of objects.
Now you may wonder, why to not use the terms file and folder/directory ?
The answer is that filesystems have evolved.
On local laptops and workstations we are used to store our data onto local filesystems that have the notion of files and folders, but "in the cloud" new storage solutions like object storages have rised and are here to stay as they offer a cheap and scalable alternative solution to local filesystems. Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift are the most notorious cases.
Object storages only store blobs, so one has to be very creative to implement filesystem hierarchical functionality on top of them. The H-flat project shows how to implement this hierarchical functionality on top of a flat namespace.
Also, a blob does not need to be mapped to a file, it can also be an in-memory representation of some information or a stream of data. One could implement a Spotify data and metadata controller for ClawIO, where trees are albums and blobs are songs streamed directly from the Spotify API. You got the idea.