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

[Jerf]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Gerd Kortemeyer wrote:
| 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.

Sorry, I was unclear. What I meant is instead of having something in the
internals of LON-CAPA manipulating the author space, and writing
seperate external access methods, implement WebDAV and then have the
internal methods just be WebDAV client calls.

AFAIK, that doesn't preclude completely independent access methods like
Samba mounting; the idea is to reduce the ugly file-twiddling code in
LON-CAPA and ship that off to somebody else's well-tested libraries, not
eliminate features. ;-) The current web interface would still work, and
it should even call the same functions for manipulation it does now,
it's just those functions could be implemented in terms of WebDAV
instead of direct file manipulations. (Ideally, the web interface is
seperated enough that it would be totally unaffected by any such change
to the underlying file access methods, be it a radical change to WebDAV
or even a simple restructuring of file access modules.)

Again, let me emphasize I don't know that this would work perfectly and
it would take some research into it, but it could pay off by making us
write one less nasty part and getting a standards-compliant access point
"for free".
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQE+NVu+PaYWE58at8cRAgZFAJ9OEIHhSaZcNj+xlViWOVa63IYoVQCfbGBm
QqJPqtZP/4w2e8UhQQ+hVI8=
=hDzJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----