[squeak-dev] Re: [ANN] Filesystem 1.0

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Tue Nov 24 05:09:24 UTC 2009


Gary Chambers wrote:
> +1 for URIs, portable access is good.

Yes, portable access is good, but one of the things that I'm wary about 
is that you may end up with code which claims to support URIs when 
really it only supports files. The difference being that a file is a 
local resource and as a consequence the type and frequency of failures, 
latency and bandwidth are vastly different from that of a remote resource.

I've never used URIs throughout so take the following with a grain of 
salt but generally speaking I'm not a big fan of mixing access to 
resources with such different failure modes and latencies. I've found 
that a distinction between local resources (highly reliable, low 
latency, high bandwidth) and remote resources (unreliable, high latency, 
low bandwidth) is very helpful when dealing with resources in 
distributed systems.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

> ----- Original Message ----- From: "John M McIntosh" 
> <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>
> To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list" 
> <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> Sent: Monday, November 23, 2009 4:42 PM
> Subject: Re: [squeak-dev] Re: [ANN] Filesystem 1.0
> 
> 
> 
> On 2009-11-23, at 7:26 AM, Colin Putney wrote:
> 
>> One thing that is interesting is that they use URIs, with made-up 
>> schema that map to their filesystem providers. So a Reference to a 
>> file in a MemoryFilesystem would have a url like
>>
>> ram:/path/to/my/file.
>>
>> And files inside zip archives look like:
>>
>> file:///path/to/archive.zip!/path/to/file
>>
>> Java folks expect to us URIs everywhere. I wonder how well that would 
>> work in Smalltalk.
> 
> I'll play broken record, and say yes we did this in Sophie. All resource 
> references to file like things was via URI.
> We also did the "made-up schema" so that we could refer to cached memory 
> files versus  http: or file:
> 
> 
> -- 
> ===========================================================================
> John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>   Twitter:  
> squeaker68882
> Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
> ===========================================================================
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 




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