[Zope] [announce] Local File System product

Terrel Shumway tshumway@ics.uci.edu
Fri, 22 Oct 1999 21:02:24 -0700


Jonothan Farr wrote:

> I've created a product called Local File System which allows you to mount
> directories from the local file system in your Zope server and serve the
> files as regular Zope objects. It also allows browsing directory contents.
> This is currently a development release so I wouldn't recommend installing
> it on a production server. Anyone interested in this sort of thing please
> give it a try and let me know what you think. It's available at
> http://www.zope.org/Members/jfarr/LocalFS

Good work.  I have seen a lot of messages on this list requesting just such a
product.

It is much simpler than a similar product that I was trying to build.  I was
trying to get Zope to publish the file objects directly. Your approach is to
treat
the file system like a ZSQLMethod -- the programmer accesses it through
DTML calls -- much less fragile, more secure.


Issues to address:
    security (not as much of a problem as with my read/write product)

    filtering -- e.g. I want to see only .HTML files (easy)

    content-type -- why does everyone have to reinvent mime.types?
        Apache, Python, Zope (File/Image), Confera, Squishdot, and LocalFS
        each has its own hard coded set of favorite mime types that get
        recognized by suffix.

        Maybe someone (maybe me) could create a mime-types product that solves
this
        problem once.  The client could point to a preferred type-registry, a
file name,
        and the first 200 or so bytes of the content, and get back a mime
type, a
        human readable name, and a set of icons.


possible future extensions:

    Uploading files to the file system.

    redirects -- e.g. for large multimedia files

    access to application-level file systems -- e.g. zip|tar|cpio files, CD
images, IMAP folders
           this could be done by abstracting the file system in a way similar
to
           ZServer/medusa/filesys.py.