A Single-File Virtual File System for Info-Binder
Its been more than two months since the last beta release of Info-Binder. Now you know what I’ve been doing. I knew that I could simplify the user experience if I could come up with a way to put all images and attachments in one file, rather than having a separate resources directory that needed to be managed by users.
To make a long story short, I created an experimental branch to integrate TrueZip into Info-Binder and test it. First let me say that it is a terrific product. Next let me say that it doesn’t work for Info-Binder because it didn’t scale. Performance degraded linearly with the size of the archive file. This is not the fault of TrueZip, but a consequence of using zip as the underlying archive format.
Thus, I found myself doing something I swore I wasn’t going to do. I wrote my own Single-File Virtual File System. It wasn’t quite as painful as I thought it would be. But still, its not for the faint of heart. It so far is proving to be quite robust and remarkably performant if I do say so myself.
So please try the latest beta of Info-Binder and let me know what you think.
P.S. Developers; I have released the source code for the VFS under the LGPL license. You can download the compiled jar separately if you prefer. The javadoc is also available online. Go here to get it.