> one of these things is in the stdlib and the other isn't
Oh it's much worse than that. One of these things is what the user sitting in front of their computer has a nice integrated UI to view and search… if a photo editing applications starts storing my photos in a database that I can't easily and simply copy some photo out of, I'll be rather annoyed. And each application having their own UI to do this isn't the solution either, really.
[EDIT: there was some stuff here about shell extensions & co. It was completely besides the point. The problem is that the file system has become and unquestionably is the common level of interchange for a lot of things.] …didn't Plan 9 have a very interesting persistence concept that did away with the entire notion of "saving" something — very similar to editing a document in a web app nowadays, except locally?
Either way I don't know jack shit about where this is going or should go. I'm a networking person, all I can tell you for sure is to use a good RPC or data distribution library instead of opening a TCP socket ;).
> didn't Plan 9 have a very interesting persistence concept that did away with the entire notion of "saving" something — very similar to editing a document in a web app nowadays, except locally?
Though I find that to be an absolute mismatch when I'm opening a document for reference purposes only, which means that any edits I might make are either accidental or otherwise only meant to be temporary (like if I'm opening a DWG drawing of a plan and am drawing some additional auxiliary lines to take some measurements or something like that). Automatically saving a safety copy to guard against program crashes or something like that is fine, but automatically overwriting the master file with my changes definitively isn't the right thing in that case…
Oh it's much worse than that. One of these things is what the user sitting in front of their computer has a nice integrated UI to view and search… if a photo editing applications starts storing my photos in a database that I can't easily and simply copy some photo out of, I'll be rather annoyed. And each application having their own UI to do this isn't the solution either, really.
[EDIT: there was some stuff here about shell extensions & co. It was completely besides the point. The problem is that the file system has become and unquestionably is the common level of interchange for a lot of things.] …didn't Plan 9 have a very interesting persistence concept that did away with the entire notion of "saving" something — very similar to editing a document in a web app nowadays, except locally?
Either way I don't know jack shit about where this is going or should go. I'm a networking person, all I can tell you for sure is to use a good RPC or data distribution library instead of opening a TCP socket ;).