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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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Loyola University Chicago

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

2011

Filesystems

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Restfs: The Filesystem As A Connector Abstraction For Flexible Resource And Service Composition, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal Mar 2011

Restfs: The Filesystem As A Connector Abstraction For Flexible Resource And Service Composition, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The broader context for this chapter comprises business scenarios requiring resource and/or service composition, such as (intra-company) enterprise application integration (EAI) and (inter-company) web service orchestration. The resources and services involved vary widely in terms of the protocols they support, which typically fall into remote procedure call (RPC)~\citeBirrell84implementingremote, resource-oriented (HTTP~\citeFielding96hypertexttransfer and WEBDAV~\citewebdav) and message-oriented protocols. By recognizing the similarity between web-based resources and the kind of resources exposed in the form of filesystems in operating systems, we have found it feasible to map the former to the latter using a uniform, configurable connector layer. Once a remote resource has been …


Restfs: Resources And Services Are Filesystems, Too, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal Mar 2011

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.