| What,
exactly, is WebDAV? It’s
a world of seamless teamwork. It’s
cross-country (or pan-planet)
collaboration with a click. It’s
a whole new reason to love the Net.
All contained in one potent little
desktop icon. WebDAV, or
Web-based Distributed Authoring and
Versioning, is the emerging standard
in web-based collaboration. Simply
put, WebDAV allows web development
teams and other workgroups to use a
remote web server as easily as if it
were a local file server. So you and
your far-flung colleagues can all
swap knowledge, knock heads, distill
ideas, craft assets, and usher
projects to completion as if you were
sharing a single office network.
How does WebDAV work? Each of your
colleagues — whether they’re
in Bangalore or Bangor — mounts
a WebDAV volume located on the shared
web server to his or her desktop.
They can then access its files as
they would any other networked
volume.
Using WebDAV, a team of web
professionals can remotely develop,
edit, and manage a live or staged
website. Indeed, any team can tackle
any type of collaborative project
hosted on a remote server.
Technically, WebDAV is a set of
extensions to the HTTP protocol.
Several of the most popular web
authoring applications, including
Adobe GoLive 5 and Macromedia
Dreamweaver 4, already support
WebDAV. With Mac OS X, you can use
any software application with WebDAV
to remotely edit and manage websites
or other files as Mac OS X supports
WebDAV at the operating system level.
Like all good Net protocols,
WebDAV is platform-neutral. As long
as a web server supports WebDAV, web
professionals using Mac OS X can
mount WebDAV volumes to their
desktops regardless of their web
server’s operating system.
Conversely, designers and developers
using a wide variety of systems,
including UNIX, Windows, and
Macintosh, can access WebDAV volumes
on a web server running Mac OS X
Server.
WebDAV provides several key
features that streamline
collaboration and workflow,
including:
Locking: Locking protects
web team members from overwriting
each other’s changes. When two
or more people are working on the
same file, WebDAV ensures that they
compare or merge changes before
writing to the file.
Properties: WebDAV
properties make it easier to track
and locate web resources. You can
store metadata about web resources
such as document titles, author
names, publication dates, and other
information. To locate web resources
more easily, you can conduct searches
based on property values using the
DAV Searching and Locating protocol.
Remote file management:
Once a WebDAV volume is mounted on
your desktop, you can access, edit,
and manage any of the files that the
volume contains. Because the files
are directly accessible, you also can
use AppleScript to develop routines
that automate the web production
workflow. Other file transfer and
access methods such as file transfer
protocol (FTP) don’t provide
this same level of file manipulation
and control.
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