[sakai2-tcc] WebDav in 2.8

[Matthew Jones]

Looking at the compatibility [1], I'm not sure how much further this will
get us without a lot of work. I can't see it happening by the 2.8 freeze,
but perhaps there's someone out there with a solid few weeks out there to
devote to investigating this in the community for 2.9 and possibly a 2.8.1?
I'm unsure though if this would be a good investment of time at this point.
There are clients that are known to work on all platforms that support can
tell people about. Perhaps these just need to be clearly mentioned on the
release page. Depending on if an installation is running SSL or behind a
proxy, they might have different results for webdav.

These were the requirements they mentioned on the Milton page, [1]

> Your DAV webapp must have a root context path, ie "/". NOT "/webdav" etc

Must run on port 80.

Must have Digest authentication enabled

Must support locking, including the awkward lock-null support for
> collections

Must allow unauthenticated OPTIONS requests


Most of them won't work for us (easily) anyway. Many servers run under 443
for SSL. There's no way we are going to get the application to run under the
root context someone writes up a "advanced server configuration guide" where
you'll need to get subdomains (dav.yoursevername.edu) and do virtual hosting
with tomcat or proxying with run two instances of tomcat. Perhaps these are
the root of some of the client problems (With windows perhaps). We also have
a few modification to our webdav so the performance of OSX (As mentioned on
the page) isn't a killer for authentication checks, and doesn't leave hidden
files everywhere. All of these would need to be considered.

I think the best bet is still just to mention the clients that are known to
work (perhaps more prominently on the upload/download multiple resources
page) as each platform has a few that are solid. And hope that Jackrabbit in
Sakai 3 works better for this type of activity.

I believe we'd get further by just improving the resources UI to solve the
problems that dav is trying to address. Though this isn't an easily solvable
problem. Look at how many developers they have working on Dropbox. [2] And
that has really nice standalone clients for multiple platforms, a full API
to the backend and a nice frontend. :(

[1] http://milton.ettrema.com/compat/index.html
<http://milton.ettrema.com/compat/index.html>[2]
http://www.dropbox.com/about

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 8:36 AM, Berg, Alan <A.M.Berg at uva.nl> wrote:

>   Hi TCC,
>
> Ian Boston mentioned in DEV
>
> Have you thought of using [1] to replace the Sakai 2 webdav impl ?
> I think its probably trivial to write the adapter and it has solid client
> compatibility.
>
> 1 http://milton.ettrema.com/index.html
>
> Is this a sensible option for 2.8
>
>  Alan
>
> Alan Berg
> QA Director - The Sakai Foundation
>
> Senior Developer / Quality Assurance
> Group Education and Research Services
> Central Computer Services
> University of Amsterdam
>
> http://home.uva.nl/a.m.berg
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
>
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