WebDAV Papers and Articles

This area provides a lot of material for "casual" reading about DAV. This material is generally much more approachable than the technical specifications referenced in the other areas on the site.

If you have material that you would like to see published here, then please contact Greg Stein.


Articles

Zope Builds on its Success
Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz.
WebServer Online Magazine, April 1999 (Vol 4, No 4).

A second look at Digital Creations' open-source application server now that it supports WebDAV.

WebDAV: Evolving the Web into a Read and Write Medium
MSDN Online, Interview with Jim Whitehead, April 7, 1999.

This is the first in a series of interviews that Microsoft's Standards Activities team is performing. This interview is with Jim Whitehead, Chair of the IETF WebDAV Working Group. The interview discusses what DAV is about, where it came from, where it is going, and what benefits it brings to Internet users, developers, and administrators.

Collaborative Authoring on the Web: Introducing WebDAV.
Jim Whitehead
Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, Vol. 25, No. 1, October/November, 1998, pages 25-29.

A DAV introduction.

WEBDAV: IETF Standard for Collaborative Authoring on the Web
Jim Whitehead and Meredith Wiggins.
IEEE Internet Computing, September/October 1998, pages 34-40.

A DAV introduction.


Papers

How to implement Web-based Groupware Systems based on WebDAV
Fredj Dridi, Gustaf Neumann.
Proceedings of WETICE '99, IEEE 8th Intl. Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, Stanford, CA, June 16-18, 1999.

This paper presents a generic approach for implementing WebDAV-baed applications by extending HTML forms to provide direct access to the protocol methods (HTTP and WebDAV methods) and the header fields from within a Web browser. This approach is used to develop a simple collaborative project repository based on WebDAV.

WebDAV: A network protocol for remote collaborative authoring on the Web    (PDF, A4)
Jim Whitehead, Yaron Y. Goland.

This paper gives a high-level description of WebDAV requirements, gives an introduction to the WebDAV protocol, including some design rationale, and then puts the WebDAV work in context with other collaborative authoring research.

This paper was written for the European Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW'99) conference.

Web-Based Development of Complex Information Products
Roy T. Fielding, E. James Whitehead, Jr., Kenneth M. Anderson, Gregory A. Bolcer, Peyman Oreizy, Richard N. Taylor.
Communications of the ACM, August 1998 (Vol 41, No 8), pages 84-92.

This paper describes how DAV, and some other techologies can be combined together to support virtual enterprises.

Lessons from WebDAV for the Next Generation Web Infrastructure
Jim Whitehead.

This paper discusses lessons learned from adding collaborative authoring support to HTTP in terms of functional requirements for a next generation Web protocol.


Presentations

ApacheCon 2002: WebDAV and Apache
Greg Stein.

This WebDAV talk was presented at ApacheCon 2002 in November. Greg has presented similar talks at the ApacheCon conferences in 2000 and 2001, and at the O'Reilly Open Source Conferences in 1999-2001. It provides an overview of WebDAV, some useful scenarios, details about the WebDAV protocol, setting up and configurating mod_dav (a DAV-enabling module for Apache), and information about available tools.

There is an accompanying paper which provides information that is presented during the talk.

O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2002: Building Filesystems with mod_dav
Greg Stein.

This talk was presented at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in July, 2002. Unlike many of Greg's other talks about WebDAV in general, this one concentrated on how to use mod_dav to publish data repositories.

WebDAV: Distributed Authoring and Versioning    (PDF)
Greg Stein.

This WebDAV talk was presented at Adobe on May 5th and 6th, 1999 as the kick-off for their Adobe Technical Seminar Series. It provides a brief overview of WebDAV and then moves into a more technical discussion.

Web Automation and Collaboration: XML, DAV, and ISEN
Jim Whitehead, Rohit Khare, Adam Rifkin.

A tutorial given at the 1998 California Software Symposium.

WebDAV: A New Standard for Pervasive Computing
Mark Ryland.

This is a PDF version of a PowerPoint slideshow. Mark presented this at an Information Infrastructure Standards Panel meeting in November, 1998.


Miscellania

Yaron's WebDAV Book of Why
Yaron Goland.

These posts to the WebDAV mailing list provide some insight to the design rationale of WebDAV. The first three links are Yaron's intro/index. The links to each of the messages have been extracted and presented here, using Yaron's groupings. The last three links were part of the Book at one point, but seem to have been dropped; they are retained here for posterity.

Warning: don't forget to read replies to his messages. Some people have different views. However, Yaron is the only person who has taken the time to write an extensive set of posts about the design rationale. They provide a lot of insight, even if some people disagree.


[ WebDAV Resources ]
Greg Stein
Last modified: Fri Apr 6 12:38:11 PST 2001