St�phane's comment about webDAV reminds me of another idea I've been considering for content delivery. I hope it isn't too off-topic. Suppose you want to distribute your content to users not via HTML but via PDF's, word .docs, Image files, etc. To provide simple access, you set up read-only webDAV folders for their accounts which contain the documents they're entitled to download.
Yes, IIS 5 supports webDAV folders but authentication must be handled via your NT domain and you probably don't want to create an NT account for each of your external users. I haven't adequately examined Apache's mod_dav add-ons. Are there products that only handle webDAV and authentication independently of your web-server? For this system it would only need to provide read-only access. The second question is this: Suppose, you have 20,000 users and only 20 unique documents. (this is an extreme example) You want to let them access content via webDAV folders but you don't want to store 10,000 copies of one single file... Would it be possible to build a daemon that would handle webDAV requests and authentication to make it appear that the files were always available to the user but actually create directory listings and deliver documents on-the-fly from a single core repository behind the scenes? It's basically a glorified publishing engine that spits out directory listings and binary files directly to the client and saves a ton of storage. Does such a product already exist? How much knowledge of WebDAV and HTTP would be necessary to build something from scratch? What's the simplest approach? Perl? I hope this makes sense and seems relevant. Many thanks, -Peter -----Original Message----- From: Stphane Croisier [mailto:croisier_junk@;jahia.com] Sent: Friday, November 15, 2002 2:44 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [cms-list] Directory Uploads Try using a WebDAV server and client so you can map your remote repository through the Windows WebFolders. In java try: http://jakarta.apache.org/slide/index.html Regards St�phane www.jahia.org -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
