On 22-Nov-09, at 8:30 AM, James Hayes wrote:

> Hi Colin,
>
> Please take a look at:
>
> 	http://commons.apache.org/vfs/
> 	
> It is Java but is brilliant.


Hey, thanks for this link. It *is* quite interesting; they're  
definitely trying accomplish the same sort of thing that I am. I had  
hoped to steal some of their terminology, but... Reference maybe sort  
of meaningless but it's better than FileObject. :-)

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.

Colin