- From: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2002 16:42:32 +0200
- To: "Alan Kent" <ajk@mds.rmit.edu.au>, "WebDAV" <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
> From: w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org > [mailto:w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Alan Kent > Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2002 12:59 AM > To: WebDAV > Subject: What is DASL for? > > > > This might sound like a very naive question, but I am trying to understand > the use cases for DASL. That is, what sorts of problems are people trying > to solve? Being an open framework to drop any sort of query you like into > it to me does not improve interoperability in the long term. > > ... > > Hence my question of what is the goal: > > * To enable searching of content? (Similar goals to say google) It's important to understand that DASL consists of a) a framework for the HTTP SEARCH method, enabling different kinds of query grammars, and b) one specific (and mandatory) query grammar, specialized in searching on WebDAV properties (it has a single function for content matching, but this is optional). > * To enable searching through a file system to find files that match > certain properties (more like "Find Files" under windows") in a > way that is faster than the client doing PROPFIND etc on each > individual file. Definitively. > If the latter, I would implement the query engine without using indexes, > and just do the file system walk at the server end and check the various > conditions to find matching resources. Well, that's up to you. Even if a DAV:basicsearch query affects both dead (stored) and live (computed) properties, it may be able to come up with a better query strategy that does not require a tree walk. See for instance Elias' paper at [1]. [1] <http://dav.cse.ucsc.edu/dasl/mod_dav_dasl.pdf>
Received on Sunday, 9 June 2002 10:43:01 UTC