Hi,
The first VOSpace implementation I produced two years ago had a full
WebDAV interface on it but that was more to act as one of the data
transfer methods than to handle metadata requests. Conceptually VOSpace
has a messaging channel for the metadata (currently SOAP) and a transfer
channel for the actual data bytes (whatever protocol the space wants to
use): WebDAV actually seems like overkill for the messaging channel
since all you need is CRUD-support and not all the other extensions that
WebDAV provides - it's the old
using-a-jack-hammer-to-put-in-a-carpet-tack analogy. In fact, I think
that this is not the interface to use if we are talking about proposing
our *own* extensions to WebDAV - we then end up with a homegrown
interface that every desktop computer on the planet cannot use just as is.
Cheers,
Matthew
Paul Harrison wrote:
>
> On 26.02.2007, at 17:46, Matthew Graham wrote:
>
>> I think that this looks very promising and is line with similar
>> thoughts that I have had about a RESTful interface for VOSpace - I've
>> started writing these up and will hopefully have time to finish this
>> some time soon.
>
> surely the overwealmingly predominant RESTful file management web
> service is WebDAV? Just about every desktop computer on the planet has
> a WebDAV client bundled with the OS. I'm writing an implementation of
> VOSpace that also has a Webdav interface to the same metadata to
> investigate the possibilities. Perhaps we should be proposing
> extensions to WebDAV to cope with some of the useful VOSpace qualities
> - e.g. physical location independence via the vos: scheme, and
> asynchronous data transfer.
Received on 2007-03-04Z20:02:44