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newdocms: Beyond the Hierarchical File System

Posted by michael on from the new-pair-of-dimes dept.

Manuel Arriaga writes "After two years of hard work (and many scrapped versions), I have just released a (ugly, but working!) preview version of newdocms, a completely new document management system. newdocms isn't a file browser: it is a layer between the hierarchical file system (HFS) and the user, which provides a radically new way to store and retrieve documents. No longer will you browse complex directory trees or directly interact with the HFS; instead, you define any number of document attributes when saving a document and then query a database of those attributes when trying to retrieve it later on. For the first time you have a true alternative to the hierarchical file system at the OS level. Through the modification of the KDE shared libraries, newdocms currently works with all KDE apps! (I am looking for volunteers to add support for GNOME and OpenOffice.org!) This is a testament to the power of free software: this sort of innovation could never happen if it weren't for the free software nature of the underlying systems."

2 of 650 comments (clear)

  1. Didn't BeOS have this years ago by nosse_elendili · · Score: 5, Informative

    "This is a testament to the power of free software: this sort of innovation could never happen if it weren't for the free software nature of the underlying systems."

    ... or not. As I recall, BeOS had a fully functional database driven file systerm although it did not entirely through out the hierarchical side of things either (probably a good decision in my opinion). In fact, I recall reading a while back that future versions of Windows were supposed to have database driven file systems as well.

    While free software is great, let's not get too cocky about what kind of innovations it can produce when we aren't aware of what the traditional software companies have already done.

  2. Windows groundwork by SteveX · · Score: 5, Informative

    Windows XP has most of the groundwork for this - Windows has actually had it for a while; for some reason the last piece (the filesystem that lets you take advantage of it all) keeps not showing up.

    You want metadata on files? NTFS streams give you a place to store metadata (much like Mac resource forks but with any number of named streams).

    You want to search on the metadata? The Microsoft Indexing Server will build a database and let you search on it (though it's a very strange system to use - in XP go into Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Services and Applications, Indexing Service, System and click on "Query the Catalog". You can do instant searches for all kinds of stuff, look at the help.

    OLE Structured Storage is like a single file version of the filesystem we're talking about - a way of saving a bunch of objects (some of which you didn't create but that are in your document) into a file. I believe Microsoft's Office apps use it (could be wrong there though).

    Right-click on an MP3 file and pick Properties in XP and go to the Summary tab. There's the metadata - the stuff the index server is going to index. If you add a new file format to the system, you can supply a DLL that will be able to supply the metadata for those files - so you download an MP3, save it on your disk, and the index server uses the DLL to get the metadata and add it to the database. It works pretty well.

    I don't really have a point to all this, just listing some stuff that Windows has that "should" make it easy for Microsoft to add the OO FS someday and have it instantly work with existing apps.

    - Steve