Web Content Management: A Collaborative Approach

Appendix A. A Smart File System

A smart versioning file system gives developers multiple independent copies of web assets corresponding to a web site. It simultaneously manages the underlying storage so that unmodified copies of a given file appearing in many work areas are stored only once. We’ll refer to this as a smart file system.

Figure A.1 shows that the smart file system contains files that are themselves stored in a physical medium, which we call a backing store. The files in a work area are stored in the backing store. The smart file system keeps track of when a file is unmodified or modified, to minimize the number of distinct files stored in the backing store.

Figure A.1. Another work area containing unmodified files doesn’t consume additional ...