Hi there,
FileIO has the aim to make it very easy to read any arbitrary file.
I hastily copied together a proof of concept by taking code from Images.jl.
JuliaIO is the umbrella group, which takes IO packages with no home. If
someone wrote an IO package, but doesn't have time to implement the FileIO
interface, giving it to JuliaIO might be a good idea in order to keep the
package usable.
Concept of FileIO is described in the readme:
Meta package for FileIO. Purpose is to open a file and return the
respective Julia object, without doing any research on how to open the file.
f = file"test.jpg" # -> File{:jpg}read(f) # -> Imageread(file"test.obj") # ->
Meshread(file"test.csv") # -> DataFrame
So far only Images are supported and MeshIO is on the horizon.
It is structured the following way: There are three levels of abstraction,
first FileIO, defining the file_str macro etc, then a meta package for a
certain class of file, e.g. Images or Meshes. This meta package defines the
Julia datatype (e.g. Mesh, Image) and organizes the importer libraries.
This is also a good place to define IO library independant tests for
different file formats. Then on the last level, there are the low-level
importer libraries, which do the actual IO. They're included via Mike Innes
Requires <https://github.com/one-more-minute/Requires.jl> package, so that
it doesn't introduce extra load time if not needed. This way, using FileIO
without reading/writing anything should have short load times.
As an implementation example please look at FileIO -> ImageIO ->
ImageMagick. This should already work as a proof of concept. Try:
using FileIO # should be very fast, thanks to Mike Innes Requires
packageread(file"test.jpg") # takes a little longer as it needs to load the IO
libraryread(file"test.jpg") # should be fastread(File("documents", "images",
"myimage.jpg") # automatic joinpath via File constructor
Please open issues if things are not clear or if you find flaws in the
concept/implementation.
If you're interested in working on this infrastructure I'll be pleased to
add you to the group JuliaIO.
Best,
Simon
