Wes on DAV and DRP
From Wesley Felter, wesley@scripting.com:That Computer Shopper article is pretty confusing.
They're right that DRP is better suited to distribution of code, but that's because DRP and WEBDAV are so completely different that I'd say they don't even overlap.
DRP is a one-way protocol; data flows from servers to clients. DRP is designed to solve the problem of allowing clients to have a complete mirror of a Web site (whether that site contains code or data) while transferring as few bytes over the network as possible. DRP uses differential updates (what the UNIX folks have known as "diff" and "patch" for many years) to reduce bandwidth requirements.
WEBDAV is a two-way protocol; it is designed to support editing of Web sites in a safe and intelligent way. WEBDAV also supports intelligent handling of metadata. WEBDAV does not support differential updates at all; just like in standard HTTP you must download all of a resource or nothing. Despite its name of Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning, WEBDAV does not currently support versioning; this will most likely be added later.
Since the problems solved by DRP and WEBDAV are more or less mutually disjoint, I don't see any reason why they couldn't be combined. (Not the standards, but the implementations.)
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This page was last built on 3/30/98; 1:13:03 PM by David Winer. dave@scripting.com |