On 28 May 2006, at 18:20, Hubert Chan wrote:
And I heard that in BeOS, the file manager was the mail reader.
The BeOS file manager did a lot of things. It was the default address book application, for example, creating .person (or something) files with all of the person's information stored in arbitrary metadata. As I recall, the mail reader worked because emails were just text files with the body in them, and the subject/ originator/other headers in metadata. The mail folder's default view showed from, subject, and date (maybe some other things) and so allowed things to be sorted simply. I also saw a proof-of-concept Jabber client for BeOS that used the Tracker (BeOS file manager) for roster display.
Files in BeOS were somewhat closer to objects than traditional UNIX files. They had arbitrary properties (typed key-value pairs). While they didn't have methods associated with them, the equivalent could be achieved by associating a file type with an application (which fulfils the role of a class, to the file's object).
I see the BeOS filesystem and Tracker as a proof-of-concept for what we are trying to do with CoreObject.
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