WebDAD: A WebDAV Implemetation for Authoring Databases

The existing support for WebDAV-based (protocol for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) authoring is currently limited to authoring file systems because the WebDAV methods are mostly intended to operate on files and directories. We have proposed an extensible framework for WebDAV-based authoring of databases to address this open problem. This paper reports on WebDAD; the introduction and realization of our concepts based on the WebDAV protocol. WebDAD utilizes not only the WebDAV methods, but also SQL as database query language and the Jakarta Slide package as a WebDAV support environment besides a relational database to deal with the data. We have developed a taxonomy of WebDAV methods for primitive SQL statements that can be shown to be relatively complete in the context of the WebDAD framework.