From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Soup (Apple)
Soup (Apple)
Soup is the file system for the Apple Newton platform, out on different cards. When applications access soups,
based on a shallow database system. The Newton consid- they usually do so by querying and accessing a "union
ers its internal storage, and each inserted card, as a sepa- soup" object. From an application’s perspective, union
rate "store" (a volume). Any store may have either read/ soups merge all the soups of a given ID on different stores
write "soups" (databases), or read-only objects called into one unified soup for that ID. This happens dynami-
"packages" (Packages are roughly equivalent to applica- cally; when a user adds or removes cards, the union soup
tions, though they may also be storage areas or plug-ins). changes automatically, each application is notified, and
A soup is a simple one-table database of "entries" they update their presentation to the user to reflect this.
which may be indexed in different ways and queried by For example, if the user pulls out a card containing a Note
a variety of methods. Various soups store the Newton’s Pad soup, the appropriate soup entries (i.e. "notes") in
equivalent of "documents" or "files". The Newton has a the Note Pad’s union soup automatically disappear, the
rich set of indexing and querying mechanisms for soups. Note Pad is notified, and its display is updated to show
One important index is the "tags" index. Soup entries that these entries are now gone. Treating documents as
may be "tagged" with some user-defined string; applica- database entries in a global union soup made Newtons
tions use these tags to mimic the mechanism of filing en- very apt at handling multiple cards yanked and inserted
tries into "folders", each folder identified by a user-de- while applications are running.
fined string. There are a few global soups which all applications
Soups have an accompanying ID symbol which repre- use; the most important one is the "System" Soup, which
sents a soup of that "kind"; this ID is assigned to a soup by stores global information for applications, commonly ap-
the application which created it and uses it. For example, plication preferences.
Hemlock (an Internet search tool for the Newton) main-
tains two soups, each with a different ID. One soup holds
a list of search engines, the other holds the query results.
References
Soups on different stores may have the same ID, • Robinson, Ian (2004). "Newton Data Storage".
meaning that they are the same kind of soup, just spread http://www.canicula.com/newton/prog/soups.htm.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Soup_(Apple)&oldid=406494996"
Categories:
• Apple Newton
• Proprietary database management systems
• Database software stubs
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