[Building Sakai] alternative to webdav in sakai

[Matthew Jones]

FTP really isn't that great of an idea and it doesn't get you much more that
webdav besides some browsers supporting a weird syntax for logging in and
others supporting non standard ways of uploading.

However, FTP is an insecure protocol, so whenever anyone logs in their
password will be available for anyone on the network to snoop. Very few
places provide regular ftp anymore on any service they actually desire to be
secure. You could look for a sftp library, but then you're not really
getting much of an advantage over webdav because everyone would have to
download a custom client. For webdav at least you can say "get cyberduck, it
works 99.9%".

I'd say the best thing if webdav is giving so many random problems is just
examine the user agent and deny anything that isn't Cyberduck. So then at
least people won't get random success and then the general campus solution
for all problems is "use cyberduck". It seems like some versions of some
OSes work better in different versions of Sakai than others, and it's nearly
impossible to keep up.

As far as JCR, that was an experiment that was never finished. The team that
was working on it went on to work on Sakai 3 and JCR and other ideas went
into the backend of that software. It is seems highly unlikely that JCR will
ever be part of Sakai 2.

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 6:47 PM, Gao Jun <gaojun at fudan.edu.cn> wrote:

>  Yes, it's a problem. In Fudan University, few people is familiar with
> WebDAV. Many instructors and students ask us about how to use it.
>
> So, in our plan, we're going to provide a FTP-based method to the users.
>
> Here's our architecture:
> 1. Based on Apache FTP Server (http://mina.apache.org/ftpserver/), which
> is a 100% pure Java FTP server.
> 2. Implement some interface of it, UserManager, FtpFile, etc... (about 3
> interfaces). UserDirectoryService and ContentHostingService will help.
> 3. Making the custom FTP server as a tool in Sakai, and start it on
> startup. If in cluster environment, only one Tomcat instance should take the
> response. Maybe we'll add some attribute in sakai.properties like:
> ftp.start=true
>
> BTW.
> According to the Content Hosting Project (
> https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CHS/Roadmap+for+JCR+Migration),
> a JCR based architecture will be used after Sakai 2.5. But I only find it in
> kernel-impl-experimental pack in kernel-1.1.9 and failed to find it in
> kernel-1.2.0. Has anyone used this feature?
>
>
>
> On Mar,10, 2011 at 00:19, John Bush wrote:
>
> Over the years we've had continued problems with webdav.  The varying
> behaviors of different clients, the special authentication that doesn't play
> nice with SSO, and numerous other types of issues.  I'm beginning to think
> about alternatives that would allow for big bulk uploads that are more
> reliable.  Thinking about some type of browser plugin, flash or otherwise.
>  Has anyone else done some research into this already?
>
> --
> John Bush
> 602-490-0470
>
>
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>
> --
> Gao Jun
> Fudan University, China
>
>
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