AW: Legacy java.io.File and new FileSystems

[Alan Bateman]

Christian Schlichtherle wrote:
> Hi Alan,
>
> following this discussion, I am a bit confused.
>
> What Michael and me are hoping for is the ability to replace the default
> FileSystemProvider at runtime in a way which is completely transparent for
> the rest of (legacy) applications. 
I understand. The issue is simply that the current implementation 
doesn't redirect when the default provider is set. Sorry about that, it 
just wasn't ready at the time. At this point it's best to just consider 
it a bug or a left-over task. I cannot say which build it will be fixed 
in. As always, the alternative is to contribute [1] the changes on nio-dev.

> :
>
> etc. would allow an application to access archive files transparently. If
> the support is complete, it should even be possible to use JFileChooser
> (without implementing FileSystemView) and browse archive files much like
> Windows Explorer browses ZIP files today.
>   
There are other areas in the platform that access the file system 
directly so they will be problematic. I think I mentioned java.util.zip 
in one of the posts as that's a good example where it opens the zip file 
directly, and depending on platform, mmaps the central directory into 
memory. I'm a bit hazy on JFileChooser but I believe its default 
FileSystemView makes use of the platform's shell API/equivalent. You may 
want to bring that one up on the swing-dev mailing list.

-Alan

[1] http://openjdk.java.net/contribute/