How to implement Web-based groupware systems based on WebDAV

The protocol WebDAV (World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is an extension of HTTP/1.1 and defines new methods for supporting collaborative work (primarily asynchronous collaborative authoring) on the Web. The new WebDAV methods provide a good basis for building Web based collaborative applications. In order to use the new WebDAV functionality, a client application must have direct access to the protocol methods and must be able to pass certain parameters provided by the user. Common Web browsers provide only limited support for accessing HTTP methods and no support for accessing header fields directly. The paper presents a generic approach for implementing WebDAV based applications by extending HTML forms to provide direct access to the protocol methods (HTTP and WebDAV methods) and the header fields from within a Web browser. This approach is used to develop a simple collaborative project repository based on WebDAV