Is leveraging custom protocols to specify different data sources a bad idea?

[centiva-samuel-kaufman]

I'm working on a file storage library for work, and I'm trying to abstract out the underlying file storage layer a bit.
I was thinking of leveraging custom protocols for this,
ex
recipes://sandwiches/spicy/
might be configured as

[recipes]
bucket=s3://my-recipe-book/

I got a proof of concept working with anonymous classes which works with the protocol registry.
Is this a terrible idea that I will regret or does it sound probably fine?

[martindurant]

I have absolutely no problem for you using the registry in this way.

You might also be interested in the ReferenceFileSystem ("reference://") which provides a similar redirection: every path maps to some other file, part of a file or concrete data. We also have the prefixFS ("dir://") which allows you to add a prefix to every URL for arbitrary backend. You sound like you want something just inbetween these two choices.

[centiva-samuel-kaufman]

Thanks! I'm using the prefixFS one with s3fs currently to make bucket specific backends.