[Using Sakai] WebDAV & Sakai

[Charles Severance]

On Feb 13, 2015, at 2:08 PM, Marshall Feldman <marsh at uri.edu> wrote:

> Right, but a central part of my point is that if WebDAV is reduced to up & downloading, then it's not much different from FTP, rsync, and similar alternatives. This raises 2 issues: (1) why bother with WebDAV, since it's known to be problematic on the client side and apparently, since it can't be fully implemented easily, on the server side too; use one of the alternatives instead. (2) If it's limited WebDAV, with only some of full WebDAV's capabilities, then this needs to be stated clearly; don't say "Sakai supports WebDAV," and then after someone like me wastes an afternoon trying to get a certain WebDAV feature working, say "Oh, but not that feature of WebDAV."


WebDav is unfortunately  moving target - particularly the webdav implementations built into the various operating systems.  It is why CyberDuck is what we recommend - CyberDuck is much more consistent over time in its use of WebDav features.

When we first put WebDav into Sakai in 2005 - we did it to solve the use case of a folder of data to be dragged and dropped since back then browsers could not handle drag and drop.

And back in 2005 - the WebDAV clients in Apple and Windows were not the complex mess that they are now.   In a sense now that we have drag-and drop in Resources, WebDav is no longer essential for Sakai.

Perhaps we should just deprecate it in Sakai 11 and remove any mention of it from the UI.  There is no other LMS on the planet that does WebDav that I know of.

/Chuck