What are your experiences implementing/using WebDAV?

Question

For a current project, I was thinking of implementing WebDAV to present a virtual file store that clients can access. I have only done Google research so far but it looks like I

Answer 1

We have a webDAV servlet on our web based product.

i've found Apache Jackrabbit a good help for implementing it. however webDav is a serious P.I.T.A on the client side support.

many client implementation differ widely in their behavior and you most likely will have to support several different kinds of bugged implementations.

some examples: MS vista only supports authentication over SSL

most windows based webDAV client assume your webdav-server/let is a sharepoint server and will act accordingly (thus not according to the webDAV protocol)

one example of this is that you NEED to allow and Unauthenticated LOCK request on the root of your server (ie yourdomain.com/ not yourdomain.com/where/webdav/should/live) else you wont be able to get write acces in MS windows. (this is a serious P.I.T.A on a tomcat machine where your stuff usualy lives in server.com/servlets/paths/thelocation)

most(all?) versions of MS office respond different to webdav links.

i guess my point is integrating webdav support into an existing product can be a LOT harder then you would expect. and if possible i would advice to use a (semi)-standalone webDAV server such as jackrabbit webdavServer, or apache mod_webdav

Answer 2

I've found OS X's Finder WebDAV support to be really finicky. In order to get read-write support, you have to implement LOCK, in addition to other bits.

I wrote a WebDAV interface to a Postres database, where python modules were stored in the database in a hierarchical folder-like structure. Accessing it with cadaver worked fine, and IIRC a GUI windows browser worked too, but Finder refused to mount the share as anything other than read-only.

So, I don't know if if would give a progress bar. The files I was dealing with were small enough that a read/copy from them was virtually instantaneous. I think a copy of a large file using the Finder would probably give a progress bar - it does for any other type of mounted share.