20060322 -- I have started work on a VFS to (transparently) access file servers via 9P, the Plan 9 filesystem protocol. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9P
The current version of the code can be accessed here: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/axel/tcl/9pvfs/ This code is work in progress.
Right now there is code to mount a file system over 9P and transparently access it -- code that allows one to use 9P as a client.
The file "main-no-auth.tcl" [L1 ] there mounts the public Plan 9 source repository as user none (without authenticating, like anonymous ftp access) and then acesses it.
The file"main-auth.tcl" [L2 ] accesses the same repository as a different user, for which authentication is needed. This will fail unless you have an account there. The authentication mechanism uses DES, and hence it requires tclDES.
Currently the access is readonly, but it is trivial to add support to write/create/delete files and create and delete directories. I'll do that soon.
The intention is to also provide support to easily create (simple) 'synthetic' (virtual) file servers that can be accessed via 9P. That would allow tcl programs to offer access to their resources via 9P.
Axel Belinfante