Re: EFS like mac resource fork?

[Michael Schuerig <schuerig acm org>]

At 22:00 Uhr +0100 24.02.2000, Tom Gilbert wrote:
> * Poletti, Don (don.poletti@comverse-in.com) wrote:

> > Resources on the mac are exactly structure storage in a file
>
> What I meant was that a mac resource for is *attached* onto the file
> containing data. So the spreadsheet uses a proprietary binary format,
> the resource fork contains only OS-appended data (icons, associations
> etc). It is not the same as using EFS to store the spreadsheet in the
> first place.

Well that's not entirely uncommon. It's pretty usual on the Mac to
store plain text in the data fork of a file and put the related style
information in the resource fork. The resource fork is by no means an
assortment of superfluous metadata.


Has anyone of the people involved with EFS had a look at Dave
McCusker's IronDoc? Dave is the guy who at Apple worked on the
structured storage backend for OpenDoc. Now he's working on several
open source(?) projects in a very similar direction:

http://www.best.com/~mccusker/

<QUOTE>
IronDoc is a portable, cross-platform database of the structured
storage variety, which typically puts all content in one file inside an
operating system's file system. Inside this one file, IronDoc creates
and maintains an embedded file system under an app framework's control,
using structures specific to developer needs. The main low level
features are variable length blobs (the same as files), and highly
efficient and specializable btree dictionaries for key-to-value maps.
High level features are composed by applying these low level blobs and
dicts.
</QUOTE>

Michael