The WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) standard is defined as an extension of HTTP/1.1 (IETF RFC 2616) allowing for additional methods and functionality which exceed the abilities of traditional HTTP. The WebDAV functionality implements the WebDAV extension of HTTP/1.1. Thereby the WebDAV functionality goes beyond Tamino's interactive interface and enables access to Tamino resources via common client interfaces which support the WebDAV standard. You can simply drag and drop Tamino content onto your desktop – no lengthy commands are needed. Popular applications such as Microsoft (TM) Web Folders, Web Browsers, and other standalone clients, as well as a growing number of common servers already support WebDAV. Clearly, Tamino and WebDAV are a perfect match.
The WebDAV standard covers an extended set of methods in addition to HTTP's abilities and facilitates XML to describe how these methods are communicated.
The WebDAV specification (IETF RFC 2518) covers major aspects which have proved to be of particular interest to distributed production environments:
Collections
In contrast to HTTP's URL resource access of a single file, WebDAV
offers the concept of organizing any number of individual resources into WebDAV
collections. A collection can be compared to a file system directory, providing
efficient means for accessing and structuring resources. Managing collections
and resources of remote repositories opens a vast field of new possibilities
for authoring documents and tools in network environments.
Locking
WebDAV offers various concepts for collaboration on resources which may
be accessed by any number of users simultaneously.
Properties
To help to make resources more valuable, WebDAV allows properties, or
"metadata", to be assigned to any type of data. This is where
XML's inherent extensibility is particularly suited. Here again, the
possibilities exceed the scope of helpful retrieval mechanisms, or references,
by far, and leave adequate room for further developments.
Security
(ACL)
"In distributed authoring scenarios resources may be accessible by
multiple principals. To control how these principals can access and alter a
resource, access controls are needed. These controls define what actions a
particular principals is allowed to exercise on a particular resource." (from
the ACL Standard)
The ACL standard defines privileges on a resource basis. Each resource can be individually secured by different access rights.
Versioning
and Configuration Management (DeltaV)
"Versioning, parallel development, and configuration management are
important features for collaborative authoring of Web content. Version
management is concerned with tracking and accessing the history of important
states of a single Web resource, such as a standalone Web page. Parallel
development provides additional resource availability in multi-user,
distributed environments and lets authors make changes on the same resource at
the same time, and merge those changes at some later date. Configuration
management addresses the problems of tracking and accessing multiple
interrelated resources over time as sets of resources, not simply individual
resources. Traditionally, artifacts of software development, including code,
design, test cases, requirements, help files, and more have been a focus of
configuration management. Web sites, comprised of multiple inter-linked
resources (HTML, graphics, sound, CGI, and others), are another class of
complex information artifacts that benefit from the application of
configuration management." (from the DeltaV Standard)
The DeltaV standard defines a set of new WebDAV methods to allow versioning and configuration management over the internet.
WebDAV
SEARCH
The WebDAV SEARCH standard defines a WebDAV method and a query language
to search with a WebDAV namespace for resources based on Boolean expressions on
properties and content.
Since WebDAV is an open IETF Proposed Standard, the process of the standard's development is entirely transparent. Participation is encouraged and controlled by the IETF WebDAV Working Group. For further information and background knowledge on this standard, we suggest visiting the following links:
