URLs, Schemes, and Resources
An essential design choice made for Redox is to refer to resources using URL-style naming. This gives Redox the ability to
- treat resources (files, devices, etc.) in a consistent manner
- provide resource-specific behaviors with a common interface
- allow management of names and namespaces to provide sandboxing and other security features
- enable device drivers and other system resource management to communicate with each other using the same mechanisms available to user programs
What is a Resource
A resource is anything that a program might wish to access, usually referenced by some name. It may be a file in a filesystem, or frame buffer on a graphics device, or a dataset provided by some other computer.
What is a URL
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a string that identifies some thing (resource) that a program wants to refer to. It follows a format that can be divided easily into component parts. In order to fully understand the meaning and interpretation of a URL, it is important to also understand URI and URN.
What is a Scheme
For the purposes of Redox, a URL includes a scheme that identifies the starting point for finding a resource, and a path that gives the details of which specific resource is desired. The scheme is the first part of the URL, up to (and for our purposes including) the first :. In a normal web URL, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Name, https: represents the communication protocol to be used. For Redox, we extend this concept to include not only protocols, but other resource types, such as file:, display:, etc., which we call schemes.