GUI Archiver Program Beezer Going Open Source

Beezer is a WinZIP-like GUI-based archive management application for Haiku that allows handling numerous archive formats in Haiku, including but not limited to zip, tar, gzip, bzip2, and lha/lzh. At one point licensed to yellowTAB for use in ZETA, Beezer is now about to go open source, under a BSD license.

Written from scratch in C/C++, Beezer takes a modular approach that uses dynamically loaded add-ons to support different archive formats. The program will use the standard command-line archiving programs that come pre-installed with the operating system; in the case of Haiku, that would include: bzip2, rar, tar and zip.

Adding support for more formats to Beezer is very easy, and mainly requires installing the command-line app(s) required by any given format (you may find some at the Haiku Ports download page). Thanks to its modular design, adding a new archive format (or updating an existing one) can be done without changes to the program's core code.

Designed and written from the ground up as a native application, Beezer is pervasively multi-threaded and thus takes advantage of Haiku’s fine grain switching to achieve superb responsiveness. Beezer's code will be hosted at OsDrawer.

Beezer At-a-Glance

• Developer: Ramshankar V
• Homepage: http://sites.google.com/site/appbeezer/home
• Repository: http://dev.osdrawer.net/projects/show/beezer
• Documentation: Beezer: An Architectural Overview