From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "John E. Barham" Subject: Re: [9fans] WebDAV file system To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Message-id: <01ea01c27fdb$9a924dc0$620da8c0@HPN5415> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT References: <015801c27fc2$2170f8b0$620da8c0@HPN5415> Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 22:14:27 -0800 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 11ac7b48-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.