9.9 Summary

The interactions in this chapter illustrate all the WebDAV methods plus a couple from HTTP used commonly in distributed authoring scenarios. The requests all come from real deployed WebDAV clients Microsoft Web Folders and a free Unix client called cadaver. The responses all come from Xythos WebFile Server.

Web Folders uses nonstandard protocol mechanisms and has a couple of obvious bugs. Most of these can be ignored, such as the nonstandard Translate and Destroy headers. However, a server wanting to interoperate with Web Folders must support the nonstandard datatype attribute in PROPFIND responses that tells Web Folders the format in which date properties are expressed.

Web Folders could be designed to be faster. Word and Web Folders make a bunch of requests with no discernable purpose, such as the PROPFIND request just before an UNLOCK request. This wastes a considerable amount of time and bandwidth and can make even a reasonably fast server seem slow to a user.

A user might use more than one WebDAV client in an authoring scenario. For example, Web Folders allows users to directly edit resources on a repository with the Office suite, whereas cadaver allows users to directly manipulate properties. Both clients provide file management features over WebDAV.

An ordinary WebDAV server can be used to enact a simple workflow process. In our example that process is managed via properties and values that are created by client software or the user, without any special logic on the server.