Thursday, November 13, 2008

Quantum Of Solace (2008)

New Bond movie is just around the corner. My friend and I managed to get two tickets just in time for the very first show, which will be shown in 3 hours from now. It will be Nov 14th 12.01 AM. We were so lucky that we managed to buy these two tickets for student discount and we were so luck that to get these two tickets to this show. Anyways, it's gonna be interesting.....and no spoilers; I promise. ;-)

FUSE

FUSE allows to develop fully functional filesystem in a userspace program. It provides,

1. Simple library API
2. Simple installation (no need to patch or recompile the kernel)
3. Secure implementation
4. Userspace - kernel interface is very efficient
5. Usable by non privileged users
6. Runs on Linux kernels 2.4.X and 2.6.X
7. Has proven very stable over time
[above items are extracted from http://fuse.sourceforge.net/]

Recently (after spending almost 2 weeks) I completed an assignment for Operating System class which needed an implementation of filesystem that follows FAT concepts. Inevitably I stick to FAT12/16 paradigm because it was easy to (kinda :-)) implement and simulate it. I didn't implement every little fine grained part of it, but for me it was quit a exhilarating assignment and I am happy with it. This assignment had forced me to teach a lot of C stuff. I believe, now I have a relatively good understanding of how to tame this beast.

So, why am I interested in FUSE anymore. Don't know whether this is feasible, but just hear me out. I am thinking of a concept of "mounting" a Web service. It's like you mount a disk and do all sort of operations and we kind a write a FILESYSTEM that would follow the same semantics of Web services, but in the context of file system paradigm. Ex: one could create a file say "foo.txt", but now this will be a Web service which will be exposed by this FILESYSTEM. Another thing I could think of is a directory, which is a grouping of web services. These are just wild thoughts. Since I'm now a die heart fan of C, I would like to give a "hello world" try to this idea in December using Axis2/C.

Hence, when you mount a disk which will adheres to this FILESYSTEM it will mount Web services. And of course you could umount the FILESYSTE anytime you want. Let me see whether I could come up with something useful and feasible and post the results. Anyway...

What you guys think ? Am I going crazy of what :-)