[DAS] RFC: DAV and a writable DAS 2 server

[Andrew Dalke]

                DAV and a writable DAS 2 server

There is one more piece of web technology I want to mention, DAV (see
http://www.webdav.org).  This is an extension of HTTP/1.1 which
improves support for distributed authoring.  It adds properties,
namespace manipulation, and locking.  DAV is available in many tools,
including Internet Explorer.

DAV should make it easy to modify a DAS 2.0 server.  For example,
suppose I have a new set of features.  I create them as a set of files
on the local file system, where the name of the file is feature
identifier.  I copy it to the server into the <dsn>/feature/ directory
(in detail, I get a write lock, PUT the new records into the
<dsn>/feature/<id> for each id, and yield the lock).  And that is it!

Implementation-wise, the DAS server would need to talk to the
DAV-enabled server and to the back-end database, so that it parses new
features as they come in and rebuilds the database and the end of the
transaction (when the lock is returned).  But the end result makes it
very easy to maintain and update a DAS server.

DAV can also be used to add metadata to records.  For example, it
could include properties like "last modified" or "owner."  I do not
know enough about DAV to know if/when properties should be used.



				Andrew Dalke
				dalke@dalkescientific.com
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