Storages and Streams
--------------------

The Bonobo interfaces contain a mechanism for storing compound
documents based on CORBA.

The top-level component will create a "Storage" in which it will store
its data as well as its containee's data.  The storage provides the
operations of a file system and its whole contents are usually stored
in a single file in the native file system.

Storages can contain other Storages and Streams.  Storages are used to
create a file-system hierachy.  Streams on the other hand represent
files inside the hierarchy.

Storages, as other Bonobo objects are CORBA servers: they are created
by the toplevel container and a handle to sub-storages and sub-streams
is passed down to containee objects to store their information in.


The implementation

As with other Bonobo objects, Storages and Streams are implemented by the
GTK-object GnomeStorage and GnomeStream.  These are abstract classes
that provide the basic corba hookup.  The actual storage faciliy
depends on the features you want.

The recommended storage facility is Dietmar Maurer's libefs which
provides an Embedded File System (EFS). This will provide the data
aggregation inherant in the Storage / Stream structure within the
convenient unit of a single file.

Another storage implementation available is the GnomeStorageFS /
GnomeStreamFS combibation:  these represent the top-level storage
as a directory on a native filesystem, each stream being an
actual file in the conventional sense.

Shortly an OLE2 file compatible storage facility will be available.

Also there are plans to implement a storage facility based on Josh
Macdonald's librepo and using a db2 database to store the information.