As I am very interested in WebDAV based RESTful WebServices I want to provide some feedback on the current draft of JSR-311 "JAX-RS: Java API for RESTful WebServices".
The current draft (April 18, 2008) says in chapter 1.2 "Goals": " The API will provide high level support for common HTTP usage patterns and will be 8
sufficiently flexible to support a variety of HTTP applications including WebDAV[6] and the Atom 9
Publishing Protocol[7]. ". Reading this, people will assume that WebDAV is supported beyond the core http verbs.
Part of the WebDAV protocol are the MKCOL and PROPFIND commands. Those are needed to create and list the directory structure. Microsoft Windows for example is able to use any WebDAV folder just like a CIFS folder: It can list it's directory structure, and it can create folders on the WebDAV folder.
RESTful WebServices ontop of WebDAV are a cool feature, because it would allow to use Microsoft Windows Explorer, Konqueror or any other WebDAV enabled file system browser (even the DIR and CD commands in Windows XP's CMD.exe command line shell) to browse content that actually is not physically existing, but computed by a Java-implemented WebService. It is the dream of our company to not provide our own client software for our enteprise application, but just let people use their WebDAV file system browser of choice to browse through our database content. Data rows will show up as simple files. Users that never knew what a database is could deal with the date. Wouldn't that be great? It would.
Since folders are an essential part of both, the paradigm of file management and WebDAV as a file management protocol, support for folders in JSR-311 is absolutely essential and would be quite simple to add to the specification.
Unfortunately we not find annotations for PROPFIND and MKCOL in the current draft. It seems, that *real* support for WebDAV is not part of the specification, despite above quote of the goals chapter. We do not understand how you meant "will be sufficiently flexible to support ... WebDAV", because we do not see how JAX-RS will enable the programmer to react to the PROPFIND and MKCOL verbs.
Unless there will be @PROPFIND / @MKCOL or a general @VERB("<verb>") annotations, it seems it is impossible to provide real support for WebDAV in JAX-RS. Actually we think that @VERB("<verb>") would be a better, since more flexible, approach compared to a fixed set of @GET, @POST etc. annotations independent of the missing PROPFIND and MKCOL support.
We know that you do not guarantee to answer on any single feedback, but since our target design essentially needs the WebDAV folder support, we would be really glad if you could answer how it is planned to support those WebDAV features in the final release of JSR-311.
Thanks a lot! :-)
Markus
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