November 1, 2009

The Extended MKCOL for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning protocol specification has been approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 5689. This protocol extends the MKCOL method so that it can set a range of properties upon collection creation. MKCOL thus acts like a combined MKCOL + PROPPATCH request. Congratulations to Cyrus Daboo for his work on this protocol!.

Scanner Pro, by Readdle turns an iPhone into a document scanner, able to save scanned pages off to a WebDAV server.

The latest version of Mac OS X Server (10.6) provides support for CardDAV, which provides remote access to address books, using WebDAV. Information about CardDAV can be found at the CardDAV Resource web site, and in the latest specification.

December 18, 2008

The WebDAV Current Principal Extension to the WebDAV Access Control (ACL) Protocol has been approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 5397. This protocol permits a WebDAV client to discover what principal (user) the server thinks is currently authenticated. This is useful in providing full-service client implementations that use the ACL protocol. Congratulations to Wilfredo Sanchez and Cyrus Daboo for creating this protocol!

DAV-E is a WebDAV client for iPhone, with free and full versions. It provides remote file browsing via WebDAV, and can be used to upload pictures taken with the iPhone. Brough to you by <green/>bytes, which hosts an excellent WebDAV resources page.

Google calendar now officially supports CalDAV. TidBITS writes that, after several months of unofficial support for CalDAV, Google Calendar now officially supports the WebDAV Calendaring protocol, CalDAV. In practical terms, iCal users on the Mac can now sync their calendars with Google Calendar. In related news, the Zimbra open source shared calendar server for Linux and Mac also has CalDAV support.

Milton is a Java-based open source server-side WebDAV library. A developer would use Milton to wrap an existing data source, such as a database or content management system, and expose it via the WebDAV protocol. It has been tested to work with WindowsXP, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Instaviz is a graph drawing application for the iPhone. It can store the graphs you create on a remote WebDAV server. See a video of Instaviz in action.

Real Time Logic has released a free version of the BarracudaDrive application for Linksys NSLU2. The NSLU2 is a device made by Linksys that makes USB Flash memory and hard drives accessible across a network. The BarracudaDrive application makes the NSLU2 accessible via WebDAV, and also provides content management system and message board capability. When used with USB flash memory, the NSLU2 has no moving parts, and would be expected to have a long lifetime. That's a lot of capability for appx. USD $60.

November 21, 2008

The DAV Searching and Locating (DASL, or WebDAV SEARCH) protocol has been officially published by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 5323.

Document editing and personal notetaking software VoodooPad has added WebDAV support in version 4.0. Any documents you edit using VoodooPad are automatically synchronized to a remote WebDAV server, providing remote access from any machine. This is an exciting use of WebDAV for remote document editing!

Cloud storage increasingly means WebDAV. Egnyte is a cloud storage company that provides WebDAV support with its USD $15/month power user account. ParaScale provides software that allows users to create and manage cloud storage. It has standard support for WebDAV.

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 G�tz 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.

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.