The Open Source Journal

As a coder, it's always nice to see other people get some use out of what you did. Most of the projects I work on are closed-source and proprietary, as such I'm glad to see that the LoggerFS project, which I unfortunately don't have time to maintain properly atm, has produced something useful in the form of a fuse C++ wrapper called fusexx.

I love developing in C++, as such it was only natural for me to want to use C++ to write LoggerFS. Unfortunately, there wasn't a single C++ language binding that was object oriented. Therefore, I set out to write a simple FUSE C++ binding that would enforce object oriented practices/ design. The result of which is a C++ header file dubbed fusexx. And for reference purposes I also wrote a brief tutorial explaining how to write a Hello World FUSE module using fusexx (found here).

A quick Google has recently revealed that much to my surprise people have actually used fusexx for some cool projects:

• PostgreFS (http://code.google.com/p/postgrefs/): PostgreFS is Linux userspace filesystem which stores data in a PostgreSQL database.
• Connexion/ RAD Linux (http://www.radlinux.org/connexion/wiki): it's a framework that connects services, user interfaces and control modules.
• HD-DVD FS (http://www.decrypthd.org/): HDDVDFS is a virtual filesystem that allows AACS encrypted discs to be accessed as if they are normal unencrypted discs. It does this by stripping AACS encryption of the files in the background. The application opening the files will only see the decrypted files as if AACS was never there.
• Pile Implementation (http://data.fieldsofnoise.org/repository/jessicatz/pile): taken from Wikipedia: "A pile is an abstract data structure for storing data in a loosely ordered way."

So the next time you're thinking about writing a file system in user space, and c'mon who hasn't thought about doing that, why not go ahead and give fusexx a shot?