About WebDAV

WebDAV is an extension of the HTTP/1.1 protocol, and adds new HTTP methods and headers that provide authoring support for Web resources of any type, not only HTML and XML but also, text, graphics, spreadsheets, and all other formats. Some of the tasks you can accomplish using WebDAV are:

• Properties (meta-data) manipulation. You can create, remove and query information about web pages, such as their authors and creation date using the WebDAV methods PROPFIND and PROPPATCH.

• Collection and resource management. You can create sets of documents and retrieve a hierarchical membership listing (similar to a directory listing in a file system) using the WebDAV methods GET, PUT, DELETE, and MKCOL.

• Locking. You can use WebDAV to keep more than one person from working on a document at the same time. The use of mutually exclusive or shared locks using the WebDAV methods LOCK and UNLOCK, helps to prevent the 'lost updates' (overwriting of changes) problem.

• Namespace operations. You can use WebDAV to instruct the server to copy and move Web resources using the WebDAV methods COPY and MOVE.

WebDAV support in Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 provides the following features:

• Compliance with RFC 2518 and interoperability with RFC 2518 clients.

• Security and access control for publishing.

• Efficient publishing operations on file system-based WebDAV collections and resources.