Ian C. Blenke wrote:
The only somewhat complicated thing would be directory listings.
These would be handled with a simple REST interface, where some simple
XML is returned. Ideally a stylesheet could be specified so that one
can use the directory listing url to view the filesystem from a brower.
From a bash scripting standpoint, this would be complicated to access
without a userspace command to wrap it.
Good point. With WebDAV has cadaver for shell access, so maybe WebDAV
is the way to go.
A simple WebDAV interface seems like the closest thing to a standard
that you are attempting to approximate with the RESTful interface. The
added benefit would be support from DavFS2, Finder, Microsoft
Webfolders, etc.
Perhaps something that plugs into Jakarta Slide? A NDFS backend to Slide
would potentially benefit a distributed CMS as well (without a
versioning history, as that appears to be beyond the scope of NDFS).
I would be interested in implementing something like this if there is
indeed interest.
That would be great!
NDFS is designed to reliably and efficiently support very large data
collections. It is not designed to be a full-featured replacement for
desktop filesystems, but rather is a lean-and-mean storage system for
distributed computations. Its primary users are developers and system
administrators. Such folks don't require fancy graphical user
interfaces, but they are a nice bonus. Programmatic access from
non-Java is also a goal. Easy publishing from, e.g., web authoring
tools is not a goal.
WebDAV looks to me to meet these needs without too much baggage. It may
encourage non-target audiences to use NDFS, but we can deal with that as
a documentation issue. For example, sophisticated versioning, security
and permission systems are outside the scope of NDFS.
Doug
