Yesterday was a bizarre day advancing the Climate Interactive project. I am playing the Product Owner role in the team scrum, so I am responsible for adding acceptance tests/test cases on the user stories the team is working on. We had a user story for an intranet/extranet-like folder where partners in the project could centralize internal working documents. Making this sane, imho, means providing desktop integration, which points to the kluggy and strange world of WebDAV.
I figured the hard part of this was for the Windows users, so mostly we focused on getting folks up and running with Enfold Desktop. Since the main “web master” (what a strange term when using a content management system like Plone), uses a Mac, we added a test case about desktop integration for Mac too, just to make sure we checked it out and got sign off.
What we discovered shocked me in 2 ways:
- It didn’t work on Apple. That’s right, the brand that heftily weilds a near-monopoly status on “it just works” is downright broke when it comes to WebDAV, at least for OSX 10.5.3 and beyond users.
- It “just worked” on linux. I was rather satisfied at being able to just connect to a server on ubuntu linux and plug away at using webdav with no problems (even making it much easier than TTW).
For those Mac users feeling downtrodden, don’t fret! You can still enjoy WebDav via an open source product called Cyberduck. Now if we can just get the corporate IT guys to permit the use of ED on a computer or two, we may get to exploring Windows user experience too…
Yup, WebDAV in OS X is quite broken, and it does some unacceptable things like store its metadata files on the server.
We need to work around these things on the Plone side, and I believe Sidnei has done some work on this, but it’s not landing until Plone 3.3 if I remember correctly.
Of course, Windows WebDAV is even more broken, which is why Enfold Desktop exists in the first place.
Please help us test
http://plone.org/products/plone/roadmap/187
but be aware that it has a history. See
http://dev.plone.org/plone/browser/review/dreamcatcher-plip187/REVIEW-NOTES.txt
and links from the comments on the PLIP as a starting point for
discussions.
There is also
https://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/review/dreamcatcher-plip187-2/
which provides a buildout just so you know.
Thanks for your support,
Raphael
My impression has always been that Apple is able to make everything “just work” by controlling your user experience as much as possible. When you’re providing all of the hardware and all of the software, it makes QA much easier. This is why Apple pushes brand loyalty really hard. When you start to move off brand, claims that apple “just works” start to break down. I’m sure WebDAV works brilliantly on a Mac if you’re using .mac.
Open source software, on the other hand, thrives in its ecosystem by being as standards compliant as possible. It’s always going to have a smaller user base so it has to work and play well with everything.
And yes, this does leave us with Windows having pretty much nothing going for it.
I’m not sure it’s fair to say that WebDAV in OS X is broken. Plone has a similar issue. What should you do with the metadata associated with a file when you download the file? At least in the OS X case, I believe you can safely discard it as in most cases, the metadata is not critical. But in the Plone case, the metadata can be very important. That’s why Plone has marshallers to handle different requirements.
I believe Sidnei was planning to work on this among several other WebDAV fixes but it isn’t clear that he has gotten to the OS X part yet.
Josh… from what I understand, Apple’s WebDAV implementation is indeed “standards compliant”. I can do WebDAV between OS X and other unixes without any problems. Strictly speaking it’s Plone’s treatment that is tricky here.
Hm, odd. WebDAV on OSX 10.5.5 just works for me. I think I’ll close this ticket.
Also, WebDAV seem pretty broken on Ubuntu for me.
CBC – what species of Ubuntu do you use? I have used webdav on a couple different computers running the hilarious, happy heron version and it has been effortless, really quite impressive
.