Re: [Interwiki] Web Dav

[Bayle S. <bs...@uc...>]

I am eager to hear about people's experiences implementing WebDAV and
Atom.

I feel that WikiRPCInterface is the easiest interface for a
wiki server developer to add.

However, WikiRPCInterface is a wiki-specific protocol, and it's RPC,
so there is no interoperability with non-wiki-specific software. 

If you want general interoperability (and we do), then you want a
general standard, like WebDAV or Atom. 

I've asked for clarification about when to use Atom and when to use
WebDAV but it seems there is not a canonical answer:

http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/WebDav

(see also http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/WebDavVsAtom)


However, one answer was that Atom is more lightweight whereas WebDAV
supports more stuff (for example, locking).


My own feeling is that WebDAV may be the way to go. I am heavily
influenced by the possibility of someday moving to WebDAV+DeltaV (btw,
Subversion clients and servers sort of use WebDAV+DeltaV, and are
planning to support it more in the future; so we could partially
interoperate with them if wiki "repositories" also used
WebDAV+DeltaV). In other words, there is already a web-standard
protocol for doing what we want in an interoperable way, 
and it's WebDAV+DeltaV. WikiRPCInterface is
too wiki-specific, and Atom doesn't do versioning.


However, I am worried that WebDAV(+DeltaV) will turn out to be too
heavyweight/difficult to implement, and that therefore few wiki
servers will implement it. But I don't have much experience
implementing WebDAV(+DeltaV) myself (like Alex, I was able to use a
library to do most of the WebDAV stuff for me when I used it in
WikiGateway).

On the other hand, perhaps the libraries are good enough that no one
will have problems with WebDAV.

Which is why I am interested to see what Alex (once he's done) and
Janne will have to say about their experiences implementing WebDAV. We
need more first-hand evidence about how hard (or how easy) it is to do
this.

-- bayle



On Thu, Aug 04, 2005 at 11:51:47PM +0200, Alex Schroeder wrote:
> Dennis E. Hamilton schrieb:
> > I was wondering if the Atom 1.0 API might fit better too, being closer to an
> > application level for editing and posting content on a wiki.
> 
> Maybe -- but I don't want to implement an Atom client.  I want to be
> able to grep and cat, find and touch and cp and mv, use Emacs or vi as I
> please, etc.  As far as I know, WebDAV is currently my better bet.
> 
> Alex.
>