Libferris: Everything is a Filesystem and vice versa

Ben Martin

Back 10 odd years ago Libferris (www.libferris.com) was created to provide a C++ filesystem interface with metadata support. It has since grown to include support for Index and Search and rich exposures.

Rich exposures make anything the filesystem can offer be exposed through another data model. For example, a libferris filesystem to be exposed as a document model to XQuery, a virtual table to SQLite, a tree model to GTK+2 or QT 4.x, an Xerces-C DOM, or a plasma data engine for the KDE4 desktop. It is planned to include trigger based virtual tables for PostgreSQL and improve the ongoing support for TRAMP to allow emacs better use of libferris.

Since libferris was presented at OLS in 2007, its ability to "Mount the Web" has expanded to include flickr, facebook, vimeo, youtube, google docs and spreadsheets, and others. This means you can simply "cp" an image to flickr or facebook -- perhaps directly from an on device camera that is also offered though the virtual filesystem itself. With rich exposures you can use XQuery or SQLite to inspect a spreadsheet on google docs and bring together information from multiple sources to a single report. I have also started offering your "friends" on mounted web sites as vcard files through the filesystem. The filesystem should unlock information and let you decide where to copy/use that data.

If you like filesystems and/or moving data around the Web, come along and hopefully learn one or two things to make your life a little easier.