About
Welcome to the home page of EntityFS – the object-oriented file system API for Java!
EntityFS provides a set of abstractions and tools for working with file systems and their entities (files and directories) from Java. Notable features are:
- File system entities are true entities in the object-oriented meaning of the word. A file system entity has a unique identity that separates it from other entities
- File system API:s are backend-independent. File systems can be created in RAM memory, on Zip files, on file system directories, etcetera
- Each file system have a configurable entity locking policy for protecting entities from conflicting concurrent updates from several program threads
- File systems and entities are Observable for updates
- Access controllers can be used for restricting access to entities
- File system functionality can be extended with Capabilities, such as the GZip compression capability – compress file data transparently using the GZip algorithm, or the Metadata capability – attach metadata to files and directories
- EntityFS provides a rich set of tools for working with files and directories. Tool methods range from those that make simple things simple, such as Files.readTextFile or Entities.copy, to those that make slightly more complicated thing simple, such as the IteratorCopier and the ZipCreator
When should I use EntityFS?
EntityFS should be a useful tool if you are writing an application that uses files and directories in ways other than the most trivial. See, for instance, the XML file copying example.
News
- 09/21/2009: EntityFS 1.1.4 released
- Version 1.1.4 has a few performance improvements for absolute and relative locations. An issue with the PollingDirectoryMonitorer that made it not report modified entities when running on Windows has been fixed. Read the release notes and the change log for details.
- 07/15/2009: EntityFS 1.1.3 released
- This release comes with two new filters – GrepFilter and FGrepFilter. Some utility methods have been added to existing utility classes. A new article shows how EntityFS can be used by a Groovy program. Read the release notes and the change log for details.
- 04/13/2009: EntityFS 1.1.2 released
- EntityFS 1.1.2 adds a few utility methods. Validation of relative location paths is enabled. Read the release notes and the change log for details.
- 03/17/2009: EntityFS 1.1.1 released
- Version 1.1.1 is a small feature release with two new features – A new copy method has been added to the Entities class and the EntityFilter interface was reintroduced to make entity filters easier to find in the Javadocs. Read the release notes and the change log for details.
- 02/06/2009: EntityFS 1.1 released.
- EntityFS 1.1 comes with a number of new utility methods and classes. The new OverwriteStrategy gives a more tunable way of overwriting existing entities in different operations. The filter implementation has been made more generic, and the EntityFilter interface has been removed in favor of Filter
. Location aware recursive iterators keep track of each returned object's location relative to a base directory. Read the release notes and the change log for details.