RE: [alf-dev] ALF SCM Vocabulary compared to WebDAV VersioningExtensions

[Geoffrey M Clemm <geoffrey.clemm@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Tim wrote on 05/03/2006 04:21:21 PM:

> One issue is that WebDAV is not a SOAP based web service and is not
> (probably cannot be) described by WSDL.

Depends on whether you mean "WebDAV semantics"
or "WebDAV syntax" (unlike WSDL/SOAP, WebDAV does have semantics).
So it would be trivial to describe WebDAV semantics
in WSDL, but would be impossible to describe WebDAV syntax in WSDL (WebDAV
 uses semantically meaningful HTTP methods, while WSDL tunnels everything
through POST).  

>  Thus it isn't directly 
> usable from BPEL. (should double check to be sure I'm not missing
something)

I believe you are correct.  Someone would have
to write the syntactic transformation from SOAP to WebDAV to make this
"directly usable".

> I have a general impression that the versioning
part of WebDAV has 
> had mixed acceptence and spotty implementation but I'll leave it to
> others to expand on that.

That is true, until you compare it to the acceptance
and widespread implementation of any other open versioning standard (i.e.
something other than an API to a single vendor's system), in which case
it beats all the competition (:-).

> Both WebDAV and JSR are client oriented and have
the same 
> "workspace" issue that we need to address to avoid streaming
files 
> through the BPEL engine.

WebDAV is a wire protocol, while JSR-147 is client-side
API, but I'm not sure if that makes either or both of them "client
oriented", and not sure if this directly impacts the "workspace
issue".

> Thus I believe neither is directly applicable
although clearly they 
> are both good sources to leverage and validate against.  It would
be
> a good exercise to reference the equivalent concepts and 
> operarations of these two sources in our document.

Sounds right.

Cheers,
Geoff