Re: [9fans] WebDAV file system

["John E. Barham" <jbarham@jbarham.com>]

Jim Choate wrote:

> > I'm assuming that given HTTP is a stateless protocol that it would be
> > simpler than ftpfs.
>
> The statelessness of HTTP under 9P is not a given since you don't need a
> httpd to serve the pages, 9P does that. This means that it is completely
> possible to write a state-sensitive browser. ...

Hmmm.  I guess I wasn't making myself clear.  I want to write a native Plan
9 file system that exposes a remote WebDAV server in much the same way that
ftpfs makes a remote ftp server appear to be part of the local fs.  By
"stateless" I meant that HTTP creates a new TCP connection for each page
(modulo pipelining) whereas ftp requires that the socket be held for as long
as the connection lasts.  I don't see how even a (hypothetical) Plan 9
browser could make HTTP stateful since even if you have fs access to
cookies, they're typically just handles to server-side session state which
should be opaque.

Anyway, I just thought that a WebDAV fs would be comparatively simple since
it would "only" have to implement enough client-side HTTP to be able to map
the WebDAV commands to the equivalent 9P commands.