PROPGET - get properties (meta?) - same as get info or extended attributes on mac So you see, it brought some of the same mechanisms that you expect on file operations on desktop to internet resources.įollowing are some of the analogies: MKCOL - make collection - similar to make folder It is not that you could not do it before but it was done through back door mechanism. It also introduced the mechanism to not only read, write, modify and delete a resource (uris) but also make inquires on the meta properties of the resource and modify it. It extended its semantics, introduced new HTTP VERBS. WebDAV was supposed to provide the missing story of internet : Support for authoring resource through the same mechanism HTTP. You would go round about to make your resources (URLs) available for fetching by uploading it though FTP and many number of mechanisms. In nutshell, it was read protocol and not write protocol. HTTP lacked some other qualities like multi-resource operations. (POST) provided coverage for number of semantic operations while (DELETE) was shrouded in distrust.

Internet was just not meant for consumption of resources through urls ( Uniform resource locator)īecause HTTP had strong semantics for fetching resources (GET) and (HEAD). WebDAV stands for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning. SFTP has all benefits mentioned above for WebDAV and is more popular among both admins and developers.Īnswer for question - Why did they 'invent' Webdav SFTP is more feature-rich than WebDAV and SFTP is a protocol to access remote file systems, while WebDAV was designed with abstraction in mind (WebDAV was for 'documents', while SFTP is for files and directories). There's one more thing to consider (depending on whether you control the server) - SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol, not related to FTP in any way). you can't overwrite a block in the middle of the file). WebDAV supports partial transfers and in FTP partial uploads are not possible (ie. NTLM and Kerberos authentication is common in HTTP and in FTP it's hard to get proper support for them unless you write both client and server sides of FTP. HTTP has wide choice of authentication methods which are not defined in FTP. GZIP compression is a standard for HTTP but not for FTP (yes, MODE Z is offered in FTP, but it's not defined in any standard).

In FTP the data channel can cause problems with proper NAT setup.Īgain due to one TCP connection, which can be persistent, WebDAV would be a bit faster than FTP when transferring many small files - no need to make a data connection for each file. WebDAV has the following advantages over FTP:īy working via one TCP connection it's easier to configure it to bypass firewalls, NATs and proxies.

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