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 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.

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.