[Framework-Team] comments on plip187: WebDAV

Raphael Ritz raphael.ritz at incf.org
Mon Feb 18 08:09:31 UTC 2008


Hi,

here my current take on this PLIP:

tested on Linux/Ubuntu 7.10 with Nautilus and Cadaver as WebDAV clients.

First, my overall impression: I'm somewhat at a loss here as I don't know
what to expect and therefore I don't know what to recommend. :-(

While all changes introduced are worthwhile improvements (and could go into
Plone core as far as I can see) I'm hesitant calling this

      Working Out-of-the-box WebDAV

I think my problem is: what does "working WebDAV" mean?
Examples:

(i) Binary fields: when editing a News Item via webdav I don't see how
I could manage the image that can be included with an item (nor its 
caption)

(ii) Folders: When copying over (downloading) the default news folder I
get a series of error messages from the aggregator topic's criteria
(not too surprising) but no news items at all (and of course I've created
a few in there before).
More generally, folderish items seem to be problematic still.

(iii) Extensibility: all marshallers don't seem to delegate the 
serialization
of field values to the fields but rather apply some heuristics to the value.
While the current implementations work for field types shipped with AT it
is limiting when it comes to supporting custom field/data types.
(e.g., my Record- and RecordsField (dict and list of dict types) are not
treated correctly neither can I easily hook in my own serializations.
I guess other complex field types like the ArrayField, the DataGridField,
the CompoundField, etc. might have the same problem.)


Recommendation: as I think any improvements on the WebDAV side are worth
it I'm generally positive but I would be hesitant advertising it too boldly
(WebDAV is maybe just too broken in general?).


I know this doesn't really help us and I probably should have brought this
up earlier but maybe others looked at this as well or have opinions on the
issues I raised. Sidnei, want to chime in here?

Raphael





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