Feedback on WebDAVAddOn

-- CrawfordCurrie - 14 Apr 2004

More work will be done and released to the community. We (my daytime workplace) asked Crawford to work on this.

-- PeterThoeny - 15 Apr 2004

I understand that AndreaSterbini was also working on webdav - can you Peter give us an update as to whether and how the initiatives are related?

-- MartinCleaver - 15 Apr 2004

Sure. AndreaSterbini and FrancoBagnoli have attacked it from a different angle, and developed a modified SessionManager that caches the protections from the TWiki topics into a DBM database. These protections are then used in determining access rights to topics. The DB cache is necessary because dynamic access to TWiki protections is too slow for an Apache server. I have a copy of Franco's code, but have been unable to get it working so far, though I haven't tried too hard.

Andrea and Franco have not addressed the problem of versioning, and this is where twiki_dav kicks in. Standard mod_dav is a class 2 DAV server, which means it handles most of the DAV protocol, but none of the DeltaV protocol for version control (see http://webdav.org/ for more info). twiki_dav is still a class 2 server, but it knows about TWiki topics and attachments being under VCS control, and is able to invoke TWiki scripts to correctly check-in modified files. twiki_dav also knows a bit about protections, and I have a version that will invoke TWiki scripts to check permissions before permitting a GET on a file arrived at though a specific DAV URL. I don't think this is practical, however, due to the poor perfomance of such permission checks, and will probably have to turn to Andrea and Franco's solution.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 15 Apr 2004