15.6 Summary

Information design is a crucial part of application design. Much of the decision making is simply how to format and express each piece of data. WebDAV properties encourage small pieces of information in a flat list. However, WebDAV properties are perfectly capable of expressing complex and hierarchical information in XML.

Reduce roundtrips through careful client interaction design. Since in WebDAV, clients choose what to ask for and what to cache, a naive client implementation can easily reduce performance by a factor of two or three. A careful client implementation that does more caching and planning can minimize its load on the server and improve responsiveness for the user.

Security requirements should be determined up front. This is always a good idea in application design. Many security requirements can be met with out-of-the-box software that is designed to make HTTP secure.

Many tools and components exist to contribute to rapid application development. These include client APIs, XML parsers, server storage layers, servlet-based APIs, and extensible WebDAV servers.

An existing repository can be migrated to a WebDAV repository at once or over time. Software tools exist to synchronize two WebDAV sites. Custom software can be written to migrate data from an old site to a new one over time.