The Apache Jakarta Project has released Commons VFS 1.0. "Commons VFS provides a single API for accessing various different file systems. It presents a uniform view of the files from various different sources, such as the files on local disk, on an HTTP server, or inside a Zip archive. For example, you can use filenames like "tar:gz:http://anyhost/dir/mytar.tar.gz!/mytar.tar!/path/in/tar/README.txt" to access a compressed tar file located on a web server."