[jcifs] Life saver .... and ideas

[rperrott at netcomuk.co.uk]

Hi, just joined the list

Cheers to those who wrote jcifs, it helped me out of a jam on a Win XP Pro PC with deliberately crippled WINS, I had a 
directory cloning tool written in half a day, and no I didn't look at the examples, no time to browse loads of files.

Please could you consider the following:

* adding terse example code fragments into the api docs, for the relevant classes, it takes too long looking through loads of 
example programs when time is critical.

* fix the api docs so that the various packages can be browsed like the Sun API docs.

* add a jcifs.smb.SmbRandomAccessFile class to allow random access reading and writing.

* have a branch of jcifs.smb or a jcifs.smb add-on which supports NIO e.g. Filechannel, ByteBuffer, MappedByteBuffer etc 
for SMB, this would need to be integrated with a jcifs.smb.SmbRandomAccessFile class to enable access to a FileChannel 
sub-class.

BTW:

I successfully wrote a FAT32 partition recovery program in Java (to recover all the directories and files in an 8GB partition 
image), after I was shocked that none of the commercial tools could cope with a cluster size error!  You can have the 
source if you like, but be warned it was not tidied up, uses NIO, MappedByteBuffer, FileChannel etc, so requires lots of 
memory to run, however the use of FileChannels makes file export very fast too!

Another Java project I'm just starting is a Windows Registry Hive file reader, so I can avoid the vagaries and security 
restrictions of Win32 API interface.

---- 
Richard Perrott