Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 2 Sep 1998 12:33:29 +0200 | Subject | Re: Implementing Meta File information in Linux | From | (Kristian Koehntopp) |
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In netuse.lists.linux-kernel you write: >> I think NeXT did something like this?
>To the best of my knowledge, no. They just have a resource format (".nib", >I believe) that is easy to work with, much as if a Mac resource fork were >stored in a separate file.
In Nextstep, applications could register extensions with the desktop environment. Anything having a registered extension was shown as a file. If the thing shown as a file was really a directory, dirname.ext/dirname was accessed.
For example applications had the registered extension .app. .app-directories were shown as files with an icon. Double clicking on myapplication.app started myapplication.app/myapplication.
The myapplication.app directory contained among other things the application binary and the localized .nib files for the application. .nib files (Next Interface Builder files) were GUI objects made persistent. Interface Builder and Applications were able to read the objects stored in them and reinstantiated them, re-creating the GUI object network part of the applications object network.
For Macintosh users, .nib file are close ressource forks, but more flexible. Within the Next .app directories there are usually multiple subdirectories named after the supported languages. Nextstep had a search path for nib files that first searched language named subdirectories (in a user defined order) within an application directory, then the application directory itself for nib files.
Many Nextstep applications also kept sound and image ressources as well as sample files or other data within the .app directory.
Since the command prompt was a regular Unix shell, normal Unix command line utilities including tar, cp and others, knew automatically how to deal with all this: If you operated at this level, you had Unix guru status automatically and there was no need to protect you from the fact that applications are really directories.
The Nextstep desktop had an additional open option called "Open as directory..." (Command-Shift-O) which allowed Non-Gurus to look into application directories as well.
Many Nextstep applications (Create, Diagram!, Edit working with rtfd files, ...) handled their application data in a very similar way: They also used directories to store non-flat data structures. From the GUI, nobody ever noticed this (unless this person was specifically looking for this).
Kristian
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