Getting started

[Salter, Thomas A]

Is there any additional documentation on the structure of the NIO2 implementation?  I've looked at the obvious: Javadocs, the JavaOne presentation and the Open Road article by Elliotte Harold.  What I'd like is a liittle more insight into how the implementation classes fit together and the theory behind the user-visible class abstractions.

Here's a couple of specific questions:
1.  Is there a way to handle distinct types of disk file structures that support different sets of attributes?  For instance, Windows FAT and NTFS partitions have distinct capabilities, but I don't see anything in the code that makes a distinction.  So if someone tries to access user-deifined attributes on a FAT disk, does it throw an exception?  [This is just an example; I may be wrong about what is supported on FAT disks these days.]  It looks like these kinds of capabilities are identified by the FileSystem object, as is the Path syntax and URI.  It seems like it would be better if the user should be able to query which attribute sets are available on a given FileStore.

2. I've seen a reference to how the FileSystem object would let someone import foreign file systems, presumably through mountable devices.  Doesn't this imply that the naming convention for the imported file system would need a distinct URI?  It seems more natural to map the imported file system to a drive letter (on Windows).  This would require a FileSystems.getFileSystem that accepted a Path parameter, but of course that wouldn't work since Path objects are already associated with a FileSystem.  Or, Paths.get(String) could be allowed to determine the appropriate FileSystem by some system-dependent means, but then its Javadoc description would be quite wrong.

3. Basically, I'm trying to handle two very different and very distinct disk subsystems that are accessed in very different ways, but are unified in a common namespace.   With the current Java.io.* classes, we examine the file name and determine how to access the file.  Superficially, NIO.2 should let us sort things out at a higher level and have two separate implementations for the different types of disk.  It just doesn't quite seem to work out right.  Do you have any suggestions?

Tom Salter


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