NFS server for Smalltalk?
Stephen Pair
spair at acm.org
Thu Aug 22 20:44:54 UTC 2002
> Stephen Pair wrote:
> > Has anyone ever implemented NFS for Smalltalk? The reason I ask is
> > that now that I'm starting to store files in a BerkeleyDB database,
> > I'd like to retain the convenience of having shell access to those
> > files. Implementing an NFS server for Squeak seems like the natural
> > way of doing that. Plus it would be really neat!
>
> When you say that you're storing files in the BDB, do you
> mean like general, non-squeak data that used to be in flat
> files, but now live in the database?
Yes. They're just LargeByteArrays with some meta data attached.
> I'm not sure why NFS would be the best way to get to data in
> a BDB? NSF is pretty ugly and insecure, and not even too
> terribly popular for the general netizen.
Perhaps there is a better protocol? I want to be able to mount the
files into my file system. That would allow me to have all of the
conveniences of moving files around using a normal shell and all of the
various file manipulation programs (not to mention being able to load
and run executable files directly from the command line).
> Perhaps a WebDAV
> server (or something close enough, but home brewed) or even
> an FTP server in Squeak plus a nice file browser on the
> client end like RBrowser?
I really want to mount these files into the file system...I don't care
about drag n drop copying and stuff...I can do that easily enough from
Squeak. What I would like to do is open a VI editor on an HTML template
that's stored in Squeak/BDB. Having to copy the file back and forth
would just be a pain...
Looking around the Net I see: http://ftpfs.sourceforge.net/ ...perhaps
using something like that I could get by with a Squeak FTP server and
FTPFS. Don't know how well it works though.
> But in general to me, the idea of exposing not only your BDBs
> as a filesystem look a like, but Squeak objects in general
> seems interesting... we could have something like the Medusa
> FTP server (is that what it's
> called?) like used in Zope. From your client end it looks
> like you're ftping to a computer's file system, but you're
> really FTPing into an OODB.
Sure, there are lot's of possibilities there, but that's not exactly
what I'm after. Better to have a telnet or ssh server in Squeak and
invent a command line language for squeak I think...similar to topaz for
GemStone. But heck...with a broadband connection I'm able to get a VNC
session up and run Squeak just fine over it (unless of course Squeak
running on Windows...in which case it's just awful). Having that
ability makes a CLI just about useless.
> Regards,
> Aaron
- Stephen
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