[jcifs] Re: jCIFS and WebNFS

[Michael B Allen]

On Mon, 18 Feb 2002 11:53:38 -0500
"Brian Topping" <brian at ponoi.com> wrote:

> Hi Mike,
> 
> I was digging around to find information about CIFS implementations that
might fit with WebNFS, and came across this post you had made last year.
I know how things go, so I won't be disappointed if this was one of the
great ideas that got dropped, but OTOH I was wondering whether there
might be any artifacts of this effort that you could share.

We got caught in a big refarctoring session that only just completed
(if I weren't as lazy as I am I would polish up the docs and rename
jcifs-0.6b9 to jcifs-0.6.0). The XFile interfaces (from WebNFS) was
dropped along with everything else in favor if fundamentals (but I'm
very glad I did because the result is greatly improved).

> 
> A project I am working on with Ponoi needs a strong integration of
authentication, ACL authorization model

Well you know then that jCIFS does not do the NETLOGON DCE/RPC call
directly to the domain controller then right? Are you using the open a
file on some file server and tweek that files ACLs trick?

> and storage for a number of different network file systems.  We are
using jCIFS, but it seems smarter to work on homogenizing the interfaces
for the A&A than it does to start just randomly patching together
different models and unifying them to yet another middleware layer in
our own code.
> 
> If the code were GPL'd it would seem that we would need to contribute
our changes back to the mainline sources.  If the work is equivalent
and we get a more robust result, I can't see why that would be a problem.

The code is LGPL but what that means is that modifying the library
requires that you supply the source of those changes to whomever you
intend to sell or give away your modified jCIFS derived product to
(but read the LGPL for details).

> 
> Either way, if you have thoughts on the subject (such as why you guys
didn't get this out last year -- were there intractable interface issues
to deal with bringing them together?) or can help me at all, I certainly
appreciate the input.

Adding XFile support would not be hard. The problem is there are *many*
such things that deserve attention. See docs/todo.txt to see where
XFile ranks.

I suggest you implement a trivial stub for XFile to see how it works. Then
look at SmbFile and try to get it to implement XFile directly.

Mike

PS: Please send these messages directly to the list.


> Brian Topping
> Ponoi Corporation
> 
> On Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 04:01:54PM -0600, Mark Fortner wrote:
> > Michael,
> > I was looking at JCIFS and I was wondering if there were any plans to 
> > make this a WebNFS service provider? The reason I ask, is that I'm in 
> 
> Yes. This is slated for the next release which I am working on right now.
> 
> But if you look at the XFileAccessor class (this is what you implement for
> XFile from WebNFS) and the SmbFile class you'll see they are strikingly
> similar. This is not a coincidence. If you create an XFileAccessor
> that extends SmbFile you could very easily have what you'r looking
> for. Otherwise wait a little while.
> 
> Thanks,
> Mike
> 
> -- 
> signature pending
> 
> 


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