Actually, my system (DASe - daseproject.org) does not use WebDAV at all,
but I think I know where the confusion arose. My earlier mention of
WebDAV concerned NOT the data repository software, but the campus-wide
shared storage system on which all UT Austin faculty/student/staff get
150 Mb free storage. It is simply file space and that's it -- the vendor
is Xythos and it does allow WebDAV access AND users can make items they
upload visible over HTTP. Thus, my aim was to use it simply as a way to
get actual digital assets from the faculty member into my system (e.g.,
"Well Prof. Smith, if you can throw those 100 new images from your
digital camera into the DASe_uploads folder in your WebSpace account,
tomorrow when you go to DASe you will see them appearing in your
private collection [since I will have run a batch process to grab 'em]
ready to have metadata added").
My question regarding using Atom w/in the application was a totally
different one -- this has to do with architecting the flow of metadata
(not the assets themselves) throughout the application, mainly for
AJAX-type interfaces. I would really like to have feeds that can pull
double-duty both as outward-facing AND internally utilized data
'services'.
Also, when I get to that point, APP seems like the perfect way to allow
folks to update metadata (which is the most common task -- the uploading
of the actual digital assets is, in most cases, a batch operation that
occurs infrequently).
-peter keane
On Fri, 5 Oct 2007, Brian Smith wrote:
Peter Keane:
be able to use the same attributes. Thus a collection is
simply a set of "items"
described by arbitrary key-value pairs with an associated
media file (or files if there are different sizes, say, for
an image, or an mp3 AND wav file for audio).
In one of the earlier messages, it was mentioned that you guys already
use WebDAV. Why don't you guys just keep on using WebDAV? If WebDAV
isn't working for you then AtomPub probably won't work either--they are
very similar to each other. In fact, it looks to me like it would be
easier to write a WebDAV client than an AtomPub client, because WebDAV
gives less flexibility to servers than AtomPub does.
If you just need a notification mechanism for your document repository,
then I suggest building a syndication feed for your WebDAV
implementation. Clients can subscribe to atom feeds to get notifications
of changes to the repository, and they can continue to use WebDAV to
retrieve documents and make changes.
I especially recommend sticking with WebDAV if you do document
versioning in your repository (don't you?). There is no (standardized)
versioning mechanism in AtomPub.
Regards,
Brian
