October 2, 2008

The DAV Searching and Locating (DASL) protocol has been approved by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) as a Proposed Standard. The protocol permits remote clients to perform SQL-like queries of the properties defined on resources on WebDAV servers. This substantially increases the value of properties, as they can now be efficiently searched by WebDAV clients. Congratulations to Julian Reschke for pushing this protocol through to Proposed Standard!

The XDB (eXtensible DataBase) has been released as open source software by the NASA Ames Research Center. XDB is an architecture for storing and retrieving semi-structured, schema-less data. Users and applications store and retrieve information resources in XDB using the WebDAV protocol. These resources may be documents, such as HTML, XML, or Microsoft Word documents, but may also be individual records from a relational database converted into an XML record or e-mail messages from an e-mail archive. XDB decomposes the resources into atoms of content in a hierarchy defining the context of the atom. Resources and their contents are retrieved via a simple web query interface that produces XML, text, or processed through a server-side transformation (XSLT) module for arbitrary output formats. It can use can use MySQL, Oracle, MS-SQL, or SQLite as the storage engine. If interested, contact Chris Knight, <cknight AAAT hotcat DOT org>.

Mozilla Weave is a plugin for Firefox that aims to provide a "blending of the desktop and the Web through deeper integration of the browser with online services." The general idea is for browser metadata to be stored remotely (and encrypted) in the cloud, via the WebDAV protocol. This includes browser bookmarks, history, and customizations. Wherever a user gets online, they will retrieve this information from the cloud to their current browser, providing the same browsing experience even if using Firefox from multiple locations. Ars Technica gives the service high marks, calling it "already effective and easy to use."

IDrive OSS is a cloud storage system designed from the ground up as a native WebDAV-supporting service, ensuring that it is open, and standards-based. The architecture is designed to scale, and the operators have experience managing petabytes of data in online storage services.

P300 is a free file-sharing tool for private networks and VPNs. It is multi-platform, and supports access to files on WebDAV servers. Its latest release also implements the DASL protocol, allowing clients to search for resources on peer machines. Congratulations to Markus Götz and Sebastian Breier for developing this tool.

The community information sharing service Digg wrote a piece on how Digg works, describing its technical infrastructure. At the heart lies Danga's MogileFS, which Digg describes as a distributed WebDAV cluster, and is used to serve story and user icons.

December 15, 2007

Apple's MAC OS X server now includes a CalDAV server. CalDAV supporting clients, like Apple's iCal can now remotely schedule meetings using the open, interoperable CalDAV protocol. This is an important step towards broad adoption of the CalDAV protocol, and a future where users can select the calendaring and scheduling application that best suits their needs, rather than being forced to use the (often clunky) client that works with their organization's calendar server.

Joe Presbrey has developed a WebDAV to AFS gateway. The implementation creates a per-user WebDAV server, and uses mod_kerberos for authentication. This allows files to be directly edited in a user's AFS file space. Evaluations of alternate implementation approaches are also described.

PFolders allows WebDAV access to documents stored in the PHProjekt open source content management system.

The <oXygen> XML editor announced improved WebDAV support in version 9.1. WebDAV access is implemented using the Slide package of the Apache Software Foundation.

Omnidrive is an online storage and sharing site that supports WebDAV in its professional level of service (USD $40/year).

StorageSwitch recently announced the release of its StorageSwitch File System Gateway, which provides a CIFS, NFS, FTP and WebDAV interface to Sun's StorageTek 5800 archival data storage system. This permits application developers much easier access to data archivally stored in a StorageTek system.

October 17, 2007

IT Hit has released a C# .NET WebDAV client library, featuring full class 2 (locking) support, as well as Basic, Digest, NTLM and Kerberos authentication.

KDev has released the FoxBox MMS, a device that receives pictures taken by a cell phone, and makes them available via HTTP and FTP. WebDAV can be used for spool management. This makes it ideal for web sites wishing to host photo contests, or otherwise gather cell phone photos.

Konica Minolta released three new print/copy/fax/scan multi-function devices. The bizhub C353, bizhub C253, and bizhub C203 (jeesh, who comes up with these names?) all have scan to WebDAV capability.

Holonyx has open-sourced their RESTORE backup and recovery software, which works with Windows, Novell, Max OS X, Unix, and Linux. Among its many features, it permits secure access to backed-up data via WebDAV. See the RESTORE website and SourceForge project page for more information.

September 18, 2007

ApacheCon US 2007 features presentations on the Java Content Repository (JCR), the Jackrabbit project, and Roy Fielding discussing REST. The conference is November 12-16, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

SchoolHouse is personal homework manager for the Mac that allows students to keep track of their classes and due dates for assignments. Instructors can post updates via an RSS feed that can be uploaded using WebDAV. Download for free here.

Plone is an open source content management system with built-in WebDAV support. This article on using WebDAV in Plone explains how to configure Plone to use WebDAV, and how to access Plone via the native WebDAV capabilities on multiple operating systems.

July 31, 2007

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has approved "HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV)" as Proposed Standard RFC 4918. This is a new revision of the core WebDAV protocol specification (RFC 2518), which corrects errors in the original specification and includes improvements based on interoperability experience. Current and new implementations of WebDAV should be updated to be consistent with this new specification. An appendix of RFC 4918 provides a detailed descriptions of changes between it and RFC 2518. Congratulations to Lisa Dusseault, Julian Reschke, Geoff Clemm, Cullen Jennings, Elias Sinderson and Jim Whitehead for their hard work on this specification!

The Internet Engineering Task Force has approved "Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV (CalDAV)" as Proposed Standard RFC 4791. This is the core CalDAV protocol specification, and provides a standard way to remotely access and manage calendars. It builds upon the capabilities provided by the WebDAV protocol. This is a tremendous accomplishment, completing an over 10 year long effort by the Internet standards community to develop a remote calendar access protocol. Congratulations to Lisa Duseault, Cyrus Daboo, and Bernard Desruisseaux for their hard work over many years on this specification!

Ewedrive is an online storage and sharing site that uses WebDAV. It has a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Day Software has released Communique Digital Asset Management (DAM), part of the Communique document management suite. Communique DAM natively supports JSR 170 and WebDAV.

The Hitachi Content Archive Platform (HCAP) version 2.0 can support up to 20PB of storage, and provides access via WebDAV, as well as CIFS and NFS.

November 30, 2006

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has approved "Mounting Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Servers" as Informational RFC 4709. This specification makes it easier for a user operating a web browser to open a WebDAV view of a server. Congratulations to Julian Reschke for his hard work on this specification!

Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices are increasingly supporting WebDAV as a standard feature. Iomega's 250D Series of NAS supports WebDAV as a file access protocol, as does FireWire Depot with their tNASi 5 RAID NAS/SAN tower.

In a similar trend, application specific storage is also supporting WebDAV. Sun has a storage product called Honeycomb that only supports WebDAV or an application programming interface (API) to access data, and does not support traditional lower-level protocols such as NFS and CIFS. Kodak has recently announced they will sell Honeycomb (StorageTek 5800) as Carestream, a picture archiving and communications system for the medical market. Also for archival storage, Archivas Cluster (ArC) is a distributed storage platform designed to support multi-petabyte archives that supports WebDAV (as well as traditional protocols).

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an inexpensive web-based storage system that uses a RESTful, S3-specific API for storage. Stefan Eissing crisply summarizes the S3 interface, and discusses design decisions made by S3 and WebDAV. Jungle Disk provides a WebDAV to S3 conversion service, acting as a WebDAV server on your local machine. Similarly, S3DAV also provides a WebDAV interface to an S3 storage account, allowing S3 contents to be accessible via all WebDAV clients, including file system mappers.

Interarchy is a file transfer utility for the Macintosh that, in its 8.2 release, supports WebDAV, as well as the Amazon S3 storage system.

WebDAV Working Groups

This area contains information about the IETF Working Groups that are working on WebDAV.

Projects and Software

This is the fun part... what are people doing with DAV? Look here for information on the projects that people in the DAV community are working on. Both open-source and commercial projects are listed here.

Specifications

This section contains links to the various specifications that are related to DAV, such as HTTP and XML.

Papers and Articles

Several papers, presentations, and articles have been written about DAV, which you can find here.

Other resources

This area contains resources for DAV that don't really fall under the above areas. For example, the FAQ, additional XML resources, and WebDAV-related job listings are located here.