[LON-CAPA-dev] lonc/lond, construction space, etc

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

Jeremy,

Thank you for all of the background on WebDAV, supporting it certainly
looks intriguing. Making WebDAV the only way to access construction space
will probably not work, though. Experience shows that expecting faculty to
have any functioning piece of software on their computer besides a web
browser ends up being a headache - CAPA has a lot of experience with
X-clients even from the time when we had only "power-users" ... I think we
always need to support the simple web browser interface.

- Gerd.

Jerf wrote:

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> Gerd Kortemeyer wrote:
> | BTW, what is all this WebDAV business (besides creating weird error
> | messages on our servers)? ...
> | Next thing is that in the lonc/lond rewrite...
>
> WebDAV is Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning. See
> http://www.webdav.org/other/faq.html for the various features.
>
> I don't know when lonc/lond The Rewrite is scheduled to be out, but if
> it's post-Fall 2003, one idea worth researching is having the authoring
> space be manipulated solely through WebDAV, since it seems to match with
> our ideas fairly well. (I say post-Fall 2003 because this definately
> qualifies as a big change, falling out of the scope of bug fixing.)
>
> The benefits of this approach is that a single interface meets both our
> internal needs and external user's needs in a standards compliant
> manner, and since this *is* a standard there are libraries we can lean
> on both the server and client side, which could really simplify a huge
> portion of the authoring space stuff. For instance, there is already a
> well-tested Apache webDAV module: http://www.webdav.org/mod_dav/ .
> Whether or not it is useful would take more research. Perl clients:
> http://search.cpan.org/search?query=webdav&mode=all .
>
> The downside is that WebDAV could be either too powerful (such that a
> partial implementation gets us nothing because all real-world WebDAV
> clients demand Fancy Feature #2, and we can't implement it for some
> reason, so the standards compliance is no benefit), or possibly not
> powerful enough (though in that case we could do some internal
> extensions). Also, this would take some research, though if WebDAV is a
> fit it may pay off in terms of bringing in well-tested existing WebDAV
> libraries rather then re-inventing it ourselves again.
>
> I can say with confidence that the WebDAV stuff is not going to go away.
> It's RFC 2518: http://andrew2.andrew.cmu.edu/rfc/rfc2518.html . It's
> reasonably widely deployed in certain communities, and it seems to me to
> be on a growth pattern, not a niche-player-forever pattern.
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