14.6 Summary

WebDAV provides a number of interesting benefits to different vertical or horizontal client-server applications.

A data-backed Web service can use WebDAV to offer more usable authoring to its content contributors. This kind of application was illustrated with the online photo album example, where users can edit and submit their photos using WebDAV-enabled applications like Adobe Photoshop. The Web service retains control over presentation to users browsing photos over the Web.

A server offering a set of application features like Exchange 2000 can use WebDAV to unify access to application data. WebDAV can be used to model many different kinds of documents and data structures. This also makes the application data available securely over the Internet, reusing Internet infrastructure such as firewall support, SSL/TLS, and HTTP authentication.

WebDAV can be used as a component, even when it's not suitable as the core communication protocol. The instant-messaging and presence example showed that while WebDAV is not a suitable protocol basis for instant messaging and presence subscriptions and notifications, it can still provide associated pieces of functionality.

A vertical or custom data-oriented application can use WebDAV to improve flexibility and lower costs. WebDAV typically introduces a greater level of flexibility into schema management because it is much easier to define custom properties in WebDAV than in OODB systems. Deployment flexibility increases because WebDAV separates the storage layer from the storage management layer and from the server custom logic layer, allowing each layer to be swapped out to improve system functionality.