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KDE's kio

The K Desktop Environment [KDE] provides a completely asynchronous virtual file system library called kio.

kio uses the same extended URI syntax that the GNU Midnight Commander uses; but unlike the Midnight Commander, all the file operations are performed through external helper processes ( kioslaves) in an asynchronous fashion. The helper process communicates with the master process using Unix domain sockets and custom protocols; the library performs encoding/decoding of such protocols automatically and notifies the programmer using the Qt [Qt] signal system.

Although this system is closer to the requirements that we have listed at the beginning of this paper, it is still suboptimal, for the following reasons:


next up previous
Next: The GNOME Virtual File Up: Existing User Space Virtual Previous: The GNU Midnight Commander
Ettore Perazzoli 2000-04-26