Subject: Mozilla editor and DAV

From: Jim Whitehead <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 10:13:29 -0700

Just wanted to pass along some Mozilla information I heard last week.  Turns
out that, at present, no one on the Mozilla team is working on integrating
WebDAV functionality, a definite bummer.

But, it appears that now would be a very good time for volunteers to join
the Mozilla team and implement DAV, since the Mozilla editor is currently
being re-built, and it would presumably be fairly easy to add WebDAV support
in during this rebuild process.

http://www.mozilla.org/editor/ is the site for work on the Mozilla editor
(I've been having trouble accessing it this morning, though).

- Jim

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From: [email-masked] (Christian Scholz)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 17:04:37 +0200 (CEST)

Hi!

> WebDAV functionality, a definite bummer.

Wouldn't it make more sense if WebDAV functionality would be implemented
in the underlying OS as then every application automatically would
have access to it. 
But I see that maybe more advanced features like properties etc. one would
not be able to handle that way (if it's only some sort of filesystem
structure).

I once also asked on the Linux Kernel Mailing list and it looks as if
also there nobody is working on it.. There have been some interesting
ideas floating around though like implementing filesystems in Perl
which might make the implementation of a DAV prototype quite easy.
(But as I am mostly into Python and my time is quite limited I cannot
do that. But maybe one day I will port it to Python and write the
DAV FS with this.. But we will see :)

> in during this rebuild process.

At least it would make sense to have a look at it and tell them where
some hooks should be added to do it later, etc. Usually they're quite
open (as far as I experienced..)

regards,
  Christian

---

From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 12:06:54 -0400

> in the underlying OS as then every application automatically would

No.  Why would you want to bloat the OS with something that most processes don't
need? Now, a common library that apps can use easily, that'd be different; but it
certainly doesn't belong in the kernel.

--
/=============================================================\
|John Stracke    | My opinions are my own | S/MIME & HTML OK  |
[email-masked]|============================================|
|Chief Scientist | NT's lack of reliability is only surpassed |
|eCal Corp.      |  by its lack of scalability. -- John Kirch |
\=============================================================/

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From: [email-masked] (WJCarpenter)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 09:40:46 -0700

ruebe> Wouldn't it make more sense if WebDAV functionality would be
ruebe> implemented in the underlying OS as then every application
ruebe> automatically would have access to it.  But I see that maybe

Oh, you must be talking about emacs now.  :-)
-- 
[email-masked]   (WJCarpenter)           PGP
[email-masked]                    0x91865119
38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25  73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3

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From: Steinar Bang <[email-masked]>
Date: 26 Aug 1999 15:57:41 +0200

>>>>> [email-masked] (Christian Scholz):

> Wouldn't it make more sense if WebDAV functionality would be
> implemented in the underlying OS as then every application
> automatically would have access to it. But I see that maybe more
> advanced features like properties etc. one would not be able to
> handle that way (if it's only some sort of filesystem structure).

> I once also asked on the Linux Kernel Mailing list and it looks as
> if also there nobody is working on it..

Here's one idea at least
        http://rufus.w3.org/linux/httpfs/

But I don't think he's been looking at this for quite a while.

---

From: Jim Whitehead <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 10:41:45 -0700

This approach seems to have occurred to several people.  There was a paper
in the 1997 Usenix Annual Technical Conference titled:

"Extending the Operating System at the User level: the Ufo Global File
System"
Albert D. Alexandrov, Maximilian Ibel, Klaus E. Schauser, Chris J. Scheiman
pages 77-90

http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/research/ufo/

"Ufo is a global file system. It allows users to treat remote files exactly
as if they were local. Currently, Ufo supports file access through the FTP
and HTTP protocols and allows new protocols to be plugged in. Ufo is
implemented entirely at the user level using the Catcher. The Catcher is our
tool for extending the functionality of standard UNIX operating systems
completely at the user level. It works by intercepting selected system calls
at the user level, using the existing /proc interface."

I contacted them about a year ago, and told them about DAV.  They mentioned
that the project was no longer active, but that source code was available if
someone was interested in picking it up and extending it. Their approach may
be Solaris-specific.

I did download their binary executable and ran it on a Solaris machine, and
it worked pretty well.  It was kinda neat being able to do an "ls" of the
Internet-Drafts directory (and very useful to be able to use the ls
wildcards to only find specific I-Ds).

Of course, this approach highlighted for me why you want to have both tool
integration and OS support. For example, if using Ufo (i.e., using only an
OS integration) I wanted to do a grep of the I-D directory, it would be a
really long operation, where every I-D would be locally downloaded, then
searched.  If, however, grep knew about DASL, it could then turn its request
into a DASL query, which would execute much faster.

It seems to me the advantage of OS integration is compatibility will all
existing file-based tools, at the cost of some operations taking longer than
the same operation performed by a tool that was tightly integrated with DAV,
and hence could take advantage of DAV features to perform the operation in
the most efficient way.  So, I see advantages to both approaches, with the
tight integration into every tool being the best possible choice.  But,
since this is going to take a while to occur, OS-level integration gives a
good level of compatibility for the interim as tools add DAV support.

- Jim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked]
> [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Steinar Bang
> Sent: Thursday, August 26, 1999 6:58 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: Mozilla editor and DAV
>
>