URI Pathnames

Among other goodies, ABCL-0.20 includes good support for using URI resources as arguments to about any function you would specify a filepath. Any builtin scheme like "http" or "file" or "jar" works as a full-on Lisp Pathname, with the caveat that one may not write to an associated Stream. We should be generic enough in implementation that the JVM extension mechanism for extending the classloader works for us for the most common use case, OSGi.

We pick up the ability to refer to URI, associating an input Stream with its representation as a network (or local system) bytes easily as the following one-liner:

CL-USER> (with-open-file (stream #p"http://google.com/index.html")
           (format nil "~A" (read-line stream nil)))

Underneath we have implemented a new subtype of PATHNAME, namely the type >URL-PATHNAME. We name this URL as opposed to URI as the underlying Java object is a java.net.URL with associated java.net.URLConnection that we'll be relying on for input sources.

Looking through an APROPOS for URL-PATHNAME shows the following related symbols:

CL-USER> (apropos (type-of #p"http://google.com/index.html"))
EXTENSIONS::SET-URL-PATHNAME-SCHEME (fbound)
EXTENSIONS::SET-URL-PATHNAME-AUTHORITY (fbound)
EXTENSIONS::SET-URL-PATHNAME-QUERY (fbound)
EXTENSIONS::SET-URL-PATHNAME-FRAGMENT (fbound)
URL-PATHNAME
URL-PATHNAME-AUTHORITY (fbound)
URL-PATHNAME-SCHEME (fbound)
URL-PATHNAME-FRAGMENT (fbound)
URL-PATHNAME-QUERY (fbound)
; No value
CL-USER>

which we see the defined functions to set the AUTHORITY, SCHEME, FRAGMENT, and QUERY portions of a URL-PATHNAME.

After these modifications, the ABCL PATHNAME class now has two "beyond ANSI" subtypes, namely URL-PATHNAME and JAR-PATHNAME. A short document outlining the design of URL-PATHNAME can be found in our documentation directory.

In implementing URL-PATHNAME, we actually had the ability to analyze what another CL did for their implementation. We analyzed the CLForJava technical paper, but decided not to use their abstractions as detailed on a lengthy armedbear-devel post.