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List:       kfm-devel
Subject:    Re: Fwd: WebDAV
From:       "J. Cameron Cooper" <jccooper () rice ! edu>
Date:       2001-08-07 14:30:13
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> 
> 
> It would be nice to hear about the KDE developer plans of implementing the WebDAV \
> protocol. It seems that in the near future this protocol will be _very_ important, \
> at least in the corporate market. It doesn't seem to be too complicated to \
> implement it, since it is an extension of HTTP/1.1, which is already in KDE. 
> Any help needed?
> 
You're right, WebDAV has the potential to be very important, and while 
I'm suspect of the idea of shoveling everything we possibly can through 
port 80 (see also SOAP), I also think it's poor form for KDE to not deal 
with WebDAV.

I haven't discussed it with this list yet, but I was planning on 
starting work on a WebDAV IOSlave (or extending the existing HTTP one) 
as soon as KDE 2.2 shipped. I suspect that the actual implementation 
isn't very hard, just a bunch of XML (via QDOM - see the XML-RPC code) 
parsing and adding some additional HTTP error codes. Even better, there 
are a number of open-sourced implementations already to steal ideas/code 
from. (Certainly not groundbreaking, but will require a good bit of 
testing. I can do Zope and mod_dav, and will probably be appealing for 
help in interop testing later.)

There are, however, some issues with WebDav integration with Konqueror 
and the Unix filesystem concept in general. There are questions to be 
addressed like:

o how do we let a web browser/file manager know whether we want to try 
to deal with an HTTP resource as a web site or a file system? How about 
in a network-friendly way? And a bookmark-friendly way? And a 
legacy-browser-friendly way?

o how do WebDAV resources look on a unix file system? Should we even try 
to map, or should there be a WebDAV KPart? Or both?

o since IOSlaves can get stuff to edit, how do we deal with locking? 
Should we notify if locked, try to lock it, or just ignore the whole thing?

o how is WebDAV implemented with respect to the HTTP IOSlave? Do we make 
the existing one an unused parent class, make WebDAV a separate valid 
child class, put it all in the existing file, or something completely 
different?

I've been thinking about this for a while, and think I have some pretty 
good answers, several of which will require some work on Konq outside 
the scope of the WebDAV IOSlave. I'll be preparing a few RFCs or a 
proposal for this issue so we can argue everything down to a reasonable 
plan. Look for them this weekend or so.

If anyone else wants to help, just watch the list and review the plans 
that come out. We can deal with project staffing as need be.

            --jcc
        (lastly there)


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