RE: [Interwiki] webdav vs FTP

[Dennis E. H. <den...@ac...>]

Nice collection of Greg Stein's observations.

I had a slap-your-forehead-Dennis moment too, and this is a good post to add
it to.

The thing about WebDAV clients is they are quietly in a lot more places than
you think. jEdit has a WebDAV plug-in (don't know its status), there's DAV4J
from the folks at IBM, and I believe Eclipse must support WebDAV by now (it
was pending when I last looked too long ago).  There's at least one version
of emacs that has one.  There's a standalone version for testing against a
server too.  There's more at <http://www.webdav.org/projects/>.  

Also, Zwiki is apparently hosted on Zope, a WebDAV-Python-based server, so
there should be some more info there on how they integrate them, if they do.

OS X has a WebDAV extender tied to the file system, I'm told.  

It is definitely the case that Windows supports WebDAV and provides
suite-level client solutions.  The Network Places protocol supports WebDAV,
and you can get a trial account on a WebDAV server somewhere and see exactly
how it works. Internet Explorer will access a WebDAV site, though not sure
how well editing works. (My sharemation account seems to have imploded, so I
can't test anything this minute.)

(IIS and I believe SharePoint support WebDAV, even MSN Groups does, although
the IIS one may have been turned off as a default when there was an exploit
vulnerability against their WebDAV.)

Back to the client side: The Network Places can be WebDAV bindings (Windows
will remember the logon and reconnect just like for FTP or shared files).
Also, Microsoft Office applications will work WebDAV so you could actually
edit wikitext in MS Word if you wanted to. It looks like Notepad on Windows
XP will also do it (since it uses the same file-open and Save As ... common
dialogs, but I would check that more closely).  Microsoft FrontPage didn't
do WebDAV in the past, but it might now.  (Windows knows FrontPage
extensions of course, and if your server supports both, FrontPage extensions
will be chosen first, last time I checked.)  I should point out that FTP is
supported as well and as smoothly by the OS [;<).

With regard to authentication, there is a move afoot to make digest
authentication the absolute minimum and to make it clear that it is
required.  (My memory could be really defective about this.)  The IETF is
pretty strict about wanting more security in their protocols.  Remember,
though, this is for WebDAV access, not other access that a site mite
support, including the in-browser Wikitext editing that we all know and
love.  WebDAV is really a super-user/-administrator thing, and when used for
editable content-management applications, most people want some
authentication and authorization support.  (The WebDAV Authentication RFC is
pretty hairy, by the way, but it goes down to the resource level instead of
server-level.)


 - Dennis


-----Original Message-----
From: int...@li...
[mailto:int...@li...] On Behalf Of Bayle
Shanks
Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2005 02:16
To: InterWiki list
Subject: [Interwiki] webdav vs FTP

> When Alex says that what he wants to do is
> 
> > 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.
> 
> My question becomes, if we're talking about the server side, what is 
> it that is being sought that doesn't work with FTP and SSH, for 
> example?  This sounds a lot like (non-client) creation and 
> administrative function, and it is dealing with the server-side
information architecture, storage
> structures, etc.   That seems like WebDAV as HTTP-carried file-system
> access.  Well, OK, but what's the gain in terms of wikiness?

After I read Dennis's post, and after spending a few minutes getting over my
embarassment at not realizing myself that FTP can already do a lot of what I
want to use WebDav for (except versioning; but I can't do that with WebDav
yet either, I need WebDav+DeltaV), I decided to try and find out how WebDav
is different from FTP.

I put what I found on:

http://communitywiki.org/WebDavVsFtp

-- bayle


p.s. hey this page would be good for ProtocolsWiki...



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