10.5 Summary

Many WebDAV products, both clients and servers, are already available and deployed. WebDAV client software typically falls into a few categories that solve different problems.

Some WebDAV clients are authoring applications. By far the biggest focus of these applications is on their authoring functionality, not on WebDAV support. However, these applications do support WebDAV in order to download a WebDAV resource to edit, lock it while it is being edited, and upload it back to the repository automatically. This category includes Microsoft Office and the Adobe authoring applications.

Some WebDAV clients are remote repository explorers. These clients focus on the WebDAV functionality and how the user can find and manage documents on the repository. This category includes kStore Explorer on Windows, cadaver on Linux, and Goliath on Mac OS X.

Some WebDAV clients allow a remote repository to be mounted as a local drive. These clients allow any local authoring application to author remote documents as if they were stored locally. These clients typically do not have as much ability as the explorer-type clients to expose the remote repository's advanced features to the user. This category includes Xythos WebFile Client on Windows, DAVFS on Linux, and WebDAV-FS on Mac OS X.

WebDAV servers come in a wide variety. Some WebDAV servers focus on collaborative authoring and file sharing in general. Others, like Exchange 2000 and the Tamino server, have more specific functionality exposed through WebDAV.