[Zope-dev] WebDav Bug? -- And some comments on how great WebDAV is ;-)

[Joachim Werner]

> Question :
> When I access to my folder by webdav protocol (win98 webfolder), I can
list
> the folder content, but when I want to access to a file inside, Zope asked
to
> me another authentification, then I can access to my file (wordd file
(.doc))
> but only in read only mode.

This seems to be a problem with the locking Office 2000 programs want to do.
With Zope 2.4.1 this should work. But we also found a couple of problems
(most of them probably not on Zope's end - but MS unfortunately still SETS
some of the real-life standards ...):

- If you use lower-case-only or upper-case-only names, that might be a
problem, as Windows (98, NT/2000/XP should do better) assumes that both are
the same (some DOS legacy mode I guess)

- You can't rename files via the Web Folder feature. With the WebDrive
product (which is commercial) we CAN rename files, but it is somewhat
unstable and does not do SSL under Win98

- Uploads might freeze the client system (it does not really crash, just
block for a while)

Some additional issues when using the CMF:

- There is this really great idea that you can create a news item by just
posting a MyNews.news file to your Member folder. The first problem is that
Word does not let you save an HTML file as ".news", so we changed the rules
in CMF and upload "news_MyNews.htm" files

- If the file contains empty lines, the upload won't work. Add a single
space to the line, and it will work. I guess that one is a parsing bug in
the CMF's PUT method

WebDAV really could be a great protocol. But it has some way to go. And
unfortunately many of the problems are client-side.

On the Linux platform, we'd need a kio_slave implementation of WebDAV for
KDE (though there is a WebDAV file system module that let's you mount a
WebDAV server like NFS, I've not tested that one yet).

Another nice-to-have thing would be WebDAV support in the
StarOffice/OpenOffice project (and of course I want HTML PUT or WebDAV back
in Mozilla's/Netscape's composer). OpenOffice does not get too much
attention these days, but it uses a really great, XML-based file format.
Combined with WebDAV and Zope, you would be able to do really cool things.
Just one example:

- draw a pie chart prototype in OpenOffice
- Upload it to Zope
- in Zope, dive into the XML and replace the demo values by DTML (or ZPT)
variables; you might even be able to specify variables from OpenOffice
directly
- Users can then download dynamically generated charts from Zope (e.g. a
website logfile report)
- The cool thing: It's not a GIF file or so. You can take it and adjust it,
put it into a presentation etc.

Think of similar scenarios with spreadsheet tables or slide show
presentations!

With proper browser integration, the OpenOffice files could even be used to
display stuff on the web! This would be something like "rich HTML" ...

Joachim