About

TrueZIP is a Java based virtual file system (VFS) which enables client applications to perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on archive files as if they were virtual directories, even with nested archive files in multithreaded environments - see Key Features. With TrueZIP, creating a TAR.GZ file from a ZIP file is as easy as calling:

new TFile("archive.zip").cp_rp(new TFile("archive.tar.gz"));

TrueZIP is Open Source Software and is covered by the Eclipse Public License, Version 1.0. The most recent version is TrueZIP 7.7.10.

State Of Affairs

As of TrueZIP 7.7.7, this project has changed into maintenance mode: Bugs will still be fixed in new incremental version releases, but all enhancements and new features will only go into TrueVFS, the official successor to this project, instead.

Supported File System Types

TrueZIP ships with the following pluggable file system driver modules:

Module Description
TrueZIP Driver FILE Provides read/write access to the platform file system. Automatically uses NIO.2 if JSE 7 is available.
TrueZIP Driver HTTP(S) Provides read-only access to HTTP(S) URLs.
TrueZIP Driver TAR Provides read/write access to TAR, TAR.BZ2, TAR.GZ and TAR.XZ files.
TrueZIP Driver ZIP Provides read/write access to ZIP, JAR, EAR, WAR etc. Supports appending to existing ZIP files, recovery of lost ZIP entries, WinZip AES encryption, BZIP2 compression, selectable character sets, external file attributes and ZIP64 extensions.
TrueZIP Driver ZIP.RAES (TZP) Provides read/write access to JAR files which are entirely wrapped in an envelope with AES-256/CTR encryption, SHA-256 authentication and PKCS #12 V1 PBKDF.

Add the JAR artifact of these modules to the run time class path to make their file system drivers available for service location in the client API modules - see below.

Using TrueZIP

As a library, TrueZIP provides simple, uniform, transparent, thread-safe, read/write access to archive files as if they were virtual directories in a file system path. Starting with TrueZIP 7.2, there are two client API modules available which can get used concurrently to access the same (virtual) file systems:

Module Requires Description
TrueZIP File* JSE 6 Provides classes which can get used in exactly the same way as the java.io.File* classes, so it's easy to learn or migrate an existing application. In addition, easy to use, yet powerful methods for standard tasks like file or directory tree copying, moving, deleting, traversing etc are provided, too.
TrueZIP Path JSE 7 Provides classes which implement a java.nio.file.spi.FileSystemProvider for the NIO.2 API (JSR 203) to enable an application to access archive files within any (virtual) file system, e.g. via HTTP(S). Applications can even read or write archive entries in random order using a SeekableByteChannel.

Writing an application for either API is really easy: Please have a look at the page Getting Started to learn how to generate a TrueZIP client application from a Maven archetype in about ten minutes.

Extending TrueZIP

As a framework, TrueZIP provides the interfaces and classes to write file system drivers which plug-in to its federated file system space. The module TrueZIP Kernel provides federating, multithreading, multiplexing, caching and accounting so that archive file system drivers do not need to take care of these aspects of a virtual file system.

There is no tutorial for how to write a file system driver, but there's comprehensive Javadoc and sample code:

For sample code, please check out or download the source code of this project and consult the file system driver implementations which ship with TrueZIP, e.g. TrueZIP Driver FILE or TrueZIP Driver ZIP.