Re: Web Browser WEBDAV support

Even if POST is used as a way of sending and processing version control
specific commands, there is value in standardizing "that" special use of
POST. This way different plug-ins or CGI bin scripts can provide version
control services with existing HTTP servers. This should not be dismissed
out of hand. The installed base of HTTP servers is quite large.

Additionally, in the new effort, I would like to see a factorization of the
DAV services such that they could be added incrementally and placed in
different places. For example, in our system, we manage the shared state of
documents on the server side and use an HTTP proxy to provide
configuration/workspace management service. Others have used proxies for
the same kind of service and also to support group annotations (a
distributed authoring service I would think). This kind of factorization
allows us to do a whole host of interesting things w.r.to version control
and configuration management. I would like to see that the new protocol
consider such architectural issues. This way we can scale up easily than
the current protocol design seems to indicate.

Adding methods to HTTP is the easy approach. We also need to keep in mind
the other neat architectural features of HTTP 1.1 (proxies, gateways, and
pipelines) and see how we can leverage them and deal with the problems
introduced by such architectural features (e.g., how does one deal with
caches kept by proxies). The recent discussion of dealing with security
through an API does not address the problems introduced by these other
architectural entities. ACLs or state based ACLs (as was suggested by
somebody earlier) need to be in the protocol for proxies and gateways to
deal with that information correctly.

P.S: (newbie question) Has there been any discussion before on the range of
services to be provided by the DAV effort and their inter-relationships. Is
there a service model document other than the ones alluded to in the
documents on the archive server. Don't we need something like this document
in order to scope our effort?










 
Sankar Virdhagriswaran			p. no: 508 371 0404

Received on Friday, 2 May 1997 08:18:49 UTC