Commons Virtual File System

Commons VFS provides a single API for accessing various different file systems. It presents a uniform view of the files from various different sources, such as the files on local disk, on an HTTP server, or inside a Zip archive.

Some of the features of Commons VFS are:

  • A single consistent API for accessing files of different types.
  • Support for numerous file system types .
  • Caching of file information. Caches information in-JVM, and optionally can cache remote file information on the local file system.
  • Event delivery.
  • Support for logical file systems made up of files from various different file systems.
  • Utilities for integrating Commons VFS into applications, such as a VFS-aware ClassLoader and URLStreamHandlerFactory.
  • A set of VFS-enabled Ant tasks .

News

VFS is splitted into core, examples and sandbox now.

Due to some technical reasons we had to move the webdav and jcifs (smb) filesystem to the sandbox. So if you need one of these filesystems you have to build VFS manually.

To build VFS, it will be best to check-it-out from svn and use maven 2 to build all at once - Notice: the ant and maven 1 build will just build the core.

And - we have a new filesystem: mime (read only for sure)

This filesystem allows you to read e-mails like archives, e.g. the attachments are the children of the mail itself.

You'll find it in our sandbox.

Also notice that we now have a "3rd party plugins" page. It will list all external plugins available for VFS.

You have such a beast - and will get listed? Just drop me a mail: imario -at- apache.org