WebDAV

  • What is WebDAV?
  • Where can we learn about it?
  • Is there code available to actually use it?

http://www.webdav.org/ has the goodies. Basically it is an 'http 1.1'-based interface to access remote file systems, for distributed authoring and versioning.

For example Apple's 'iDisk' is implemented through webdav. You can access your iDisk in Tcl like this:

    package require vfs
    file mkdir local
    vfs::webdav::Mount http://myname:[email protected]/myname/ local
    cd local
    glob * ; # list your idisk directories
    cd Public
    ...

(except the above support is not that robust yet, and only handles a few of the multitude of features that webdav and http-1.1 provide. A dedicated person could easily add to tclvfs to complete wonderful webdav client support in pure Tcl.)


[ VFS: Vince Darley ]

Dossy Shiobara has been experimenting with WebDAV for AOLserver. In his description, http://panoptic.com/webdav-20010103.tcl "was whipped together in the span of 3 hours, using tcpdump to sniff existing WebDAV tools (because I was too lazy to read the spec. and implement from there)."

The file here looks like a WebDAV server implementation.

What would be nice would be to enhance the VFS client implementation, so Tcl can manipulate remote WebDAV directories directly. The tclvfs extension now includes a very rudimentary first attempt at this. It needs lots of work!

Anyone know what happened to 'TclDAV' which was supposed to be here http://comanche.com.dtu.dk/tcldav/

Cineast appears to be an extensible web browser with webdav support.

Starsite might one day support WebDAV, when I (NEM) get round to finishing its implementation.

DLR At http://apacheworld.org/ty24/site.chapter13.html you can find a chapter I wrote about using WebDAV with Apache, including samples of how to access Web Folders (the name Microsoft calls DAV resources) from Windows.


Perhaps someone could look into binding http://freshmeat.net/projects/neon/ to Tcl - neon is an http 1.1 and WebDAV client library with a C API.


Computerworld just ran an article [L1 ] recently covering the highlights of webdav.


Find an implementation to use TclHttpd as WebDAV-Server.


04feb05 jcw - I've uploaded a new WebDAV client implementation to sdarchive, called DAVkit. See the README for details [L2 ].


Webdav is the protocol underlying Outlook Web Access. See Using Outlook Web Access (OWA) to access an Exchange server for an owa package built on top of webdav, including support of replication and an IMAP-to-OWA proxy.