libferris is a virtual filesystem that exposes hierarchical data of all kinds through a common C++ interface. Access to data is performed using C++ IOStreams and metadata is available as key-value pairs through the Extended Attributes (EA) interface. Rich support for filesystem indexing is included to provide timely search results for well into millions of files. Ferris uses a plugin API to handle a large range of data sources, metadata, and index and search strategies. Filesystems include file:// with monitoring, XML (mount an XML file as a filesystem), relational databases, ISAM databases (Berkeley db, tdb, gdbm, eet et al), xmldb, LDAP, Applications (Evolution, Firefox, Emacs), HTTP, FTP, sockets, and RDF (from XML, binary, soprano). EA generators include image, audio, and animation decoders.
