Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Restfs: Resources And Services Are Filesystems, Too, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

We have designed and implemented RestFS, a software frame-work that provides a uniform, configurable connector layerfor mapping remote web-based resources to local filesystem-based resources, recognizing the similarity between thesetwo types of resources. Such mappings enable programmaticaccess to a resource, as well as composition of two or moreresources, through the local operating system’s standardfilesystem application programming interface (API), script-able file-based command-line utilities, and inter-process com-munication (IPC) mechanisms. The framework supports au-tomatic and manual authentication. We include several ex-amples intended to show the utility and practicality of ourframework.