Amaya user interface Bedienerhandbuch PDF herunterladen (Seite 69)

21. Cooperating through WebDAV

21.1. About WebDAV

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. An exclusive lock guarantees that one person

possess the lock, and no one else will be able to lock the resource (it does not affect the resource

reading). A shared lock allows a group of users to create their locks over a resource, but they must trust

each other to prevent access problems. Besides, each lock has a timeout, but the user cannot forget that

locks may disappear in the server due to exceptions in the server.

You can find more informations about WebDAV in RFC 2518 and also at the WebDAV.org website.

21.2. WebDAV support in Amaya

Amaya has an optional and limited support for WebDAV. This includes the following operations: lock/

unlock a WebDAV compilant resource, view the WebDAV properties of a resource, and lock discovery

capabilities. Besides, it also includes some awareness functions, that can automatically inform users

about locked resources.

21.3. Sharing documents

The WebDAV support present in Amaya intents to help small groups of users to edit collaboratively their

web pages. To illustrate how it works, here is an example: supose that you have 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. To do so, you load the document in your Amaya editor, and then you can lock this document

(Lock resource entry in Tools/Cooperation menu. Once you locked the document, if one of your

colleagues tries to save some change in this document, s/he will be warned about your lock, and updates

will not be lost automatically. Thus, while the document is locked, you can safely modify it, and when

you have finished your work and saved the document, you can unlock it, allowing you colleague to lock

the document and do his/her modifications.

If you want to be aware whether a colleague has locked a Web page, you can use the View resource

properties entry in the Tools / Cooperation menu to see all the properties of the page, or you can

configure Amaya to automatically inform you if the page is locked. To do so, you will need to open the

Preferences / WebDAV dialog box, mark the General Awareness option and put your shared folder

name in the User's WedDAV Resource List field (http://davserver.mycompany.com/shared/, in

our example). Once you did this, when loading a page locked by a colleague under

http://davserver.mycompany.com/shared/ folder, you will be notified by Amaya about this.

21. Cooperating through WebDAV

1 2 ... 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 ... 107 108

Keine Kommentare

Amaya user interface Bedienerhandbuch Seite 69