Personally, I'd prefer to see this as a sort of API, which is what I think you're suggesting.
 
I don't think COM objects would be the best solution, as it's pretty much a Windows-only thing. If a different model could be used that was portable, then maybe the file format handlers would be portable, too?
 
I'm just thinking of the rather large picture - this design could be adopted by Linux too, for example.
 
However, due to the recent events regarding FAT file systems, I was thinking that this could be integrated into some sort of new file system, with some way to allow attribute tags (a bit like an XML structure in a way) so it's extendible.
 
I haven't really thought about too many of the details, but the main advantages would be applications could use the new file system as if it were an old one, and see files in several formats (so a MP3 appears as an MP3, a WAV, an OGG, etc. but no conversion is done until the alternative format is used.) This would be for both new and old applications, so it'd be backwards-compatible.
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Colin Burn
To: 'ros-general@reactos.com'
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 4:17 PM
Subject: RE: [ros-general] More crazy ideas (was: Microsoft wants royalties for use of FAT)

>To take another example, WAV MP3 OGG etc... All audio formats. All could
>have a common interface, so any program could read from and write to these
>files seamlessly, and the handler would handle the
>compression/decompression.

I dont think this really needs to be an OS feature but it might be nice if any applications that come with ReactOS offered sort of plug in file formats. You could easily write say an MSPaint clone that used COM objects to access image files. 3rd parties would then be able to write their own COM object for their own proprietary format. As good as this would be I dont think it needs integrating with the kernel but it should maybe something to bear in mind when people start to write applications to be shipped with ReactOS.

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