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+<!--
+SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2021 Paul Schaub <vanitasvitae@fsfe.org>
+
+SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
+-->
+
+# External-SOP
+
+Access an external SOP binary from within your Java/Kotlin application.
+
+This module implements a backend for `sop-java` that binds to external SOP binaries (such as 
+[sqop](https://gitlab.com/sequoia-pgp/sequoia-sop/), [python-sop](https://pypi.org/project/sop/) etc.).
+SOP operation calls will be delegated to the external binary, and the results are parsed back, so that you can
+access them from your Java application as usual.
+
+## Example
+Let's say you are using `ExampleSOP` which is a binary installed in `/usr/bin/example-sop`.
+Instantiating a `SOP` object is as simple as this:
+
+```java
+SOP sop = new ExternalSOP("/usr/bin/example-sop");
+```
+
+This SOP object can now be used as usual (see [here](../sop-java/README.md)).
+
+Some SOP binaries might require additional configuration, e.g. a Java based SOP might need to know which JAVA_HOME to use.
+For this purpose, additional environment variables can be passed in using a `Properties` object:
+
+```java
+Properties properties = new Properties();
+properties.put("JAVA_HOME", "/usr/lib/jvm/[...]");
+SOP sop = new ExternalSOP("/usr/bin/example-sop", properties);
+```
+
+Most results of SOP operations are communicated via standard-out, standard-in. However, some operations rely on
+writing results to additional output files.
+To handle such results, we need to provide a temporary directory, to which those results can be written by the SOP,
+and from which `External-SOP` reads them back.
+The default implementation relies on `Files.createTempDirectory()` to provide a temporary directory.
+It is however possible to overwrite this behavior, in order to specify a custom, perhaps more private directory:
+
+```java
+ExternalSOP.TempDirProvider provider = new ExternalSOP.TempDirProvider() {
+    @Override
+    public File provideTempDirectory() throws IOException {
+        File myTempDir = new File("/path/to/directory");
+        myTempDir.mkdirs();
+        return myTempDir;
+    }
+};
+SOP sop = new ExternalSOP("/usr/bin/example-sop", provider);
+```