WebDAV (WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol, which allows users to collaboratively edit and manage web resources on remote servers. It aims to extend the HTTP protocol to develop new distributed authoring tools in the web, specially emphasizing the collaborative authoring of web pages.
The lock mechanism defined in WebDAV has been design to prevent the resources overwriting (that is, to prevent the lost update problem) using the operations lock and unlock.
A lock controls the write access to a resource by limiting HTTP writing operations, like PUT, POST and DELETE. This means that only somebody who knows the lock will be able to execute those operations.
The WebDAV protocol also defines two lock scopes: an exclusive and a shared lock.
You can find more informations about WebDAV in RFC 2518 and also at the WebDAV.org website.
Amaya has a limited support for WebDAV. This includes the following operations: lock/unlock a WebDAV resource, a toggle that shows when there is a lock, and a function to get the current lock information.
Besides, it also includes some awareness functions, that can automatically inform users about locked resources.
The WebDAV support in Amaya intents to help small groups of users to edit collaboratively their web pages.
To illustrate how it works, suppose that you have a WebDAV servehave a
WebDAV server (indeed, you must have a Web server that
supports WebDAV to work with it) named davserver.mycompany.com
,
and you and your colleagues want to edit collaboratively some documents that
are in the WebDAV folder /shared/
(WebDAV folders are called
collections).
So, imagine that you need to change the document
http://davserver.mycompany.com/shared/Doc1.html
.
When loading a page from a WebDAV server, Amaya automatically informs about the lock/unlock status of the page.
The following options can be set with the Preferences / WebDAV dialog box.
mailto:myself@myhost.com
or
http://myhost.com/myhomepage.html