UWS as a REST protocol - VOSpace & WebDAV

[Matthew Graham]

Hi,

The first VOSpace implementation I produced two years ago had a full 
WebDAV interface on it but that was more to act as one of the data 
transfer methods than to handle metadata requests. Conceptually VOSpace 
has a messaging channel for the metadata (currently SOAP) and a transfer 
channel for the actual data bytes (whatever protocol the space wants to 
use): WebDAV actually seems like overkill for the messaging channel 
since all you need is CRUD-support and not all the other extensions that 
WebDAV provides - it's the old 
using-a-jack-hammer-to-put-in-a-carpet-tack analogy. In fact, I think 
that this is not the interface to use if we are talking about proposing 
our *own* extensions to WebDAV - we then end up with a homegrown 
interface that every desktop computer on the planet cannot use just as is.

    Cheers,

    Matthew



Paul Harrison wrote:
>
> On 26.02.2007, at 17:46, Matthew Graham wrote:
>
>> I think that this looks very promising and is line with similar 
>> thoughts that I have had about a RESTful interface for VOSpace - I've 
>> started writing these up and will hopefully have time to finish this 
>> some time soon.
>
> surely the overwealmingly predominant RESTful file management web 
> service is WebDAV? Just about every desktop computer on the planet has 
> a WebDAV client bundled with the OS.  I'm writing an implementation of 
> VOSpace that also has a Webdav interface to the same metadata to 
> investigate the possibilities. Perhaps we should be proposing 
> extensions to WebDAV to cope with some of the useful VOSpace qualities 
> - e.g. physical location independence via the vos: scheme, and 
> asynchronous data transfer.