RestFS: resources and services are filesystems, too

We have designed and implemented RestFS, a software framework that provides a uniform, configurable connector layer for mapping remote web-based resources to local filesystem-based resources, recognizing the similarity between these two types of resources. Such mappings enable programmatic access to a resource, as well as composition of two or more resources, through the local operating system's standard filesystem application programming interface (API), scriptable file-based command-line utilities, and inter-process communication (IPC) mechanisms. The framework supports automatic and manual authentication. We include several examples intended to show the utility and practicality of our framework.