webdav?

Hi all,

I've heard webdav mentioned quite a bit around work of late and I've been asked what I would think about coding in GoLive because of its webdav support. I used to teach web design in GoLive and that pretty much led to me using Homesite/BBEdit/vi right now, depending on whether I'm on my own or work's machine.

I'm currently developing (php, perl, vb, starting some jsp) through the above using a secure connection to the development server. Anyone using webdav in tangent with text editors such as Homesite?

Am I asking this in the wrong context? Should I instead be assuming that our an admin would make up a webdav directory and I as a developer would simply save files to that directory as I would any other directory?

Let me just add that our system of keeping track of versioning really blows, yet I'm not quite sure if it's that big of a deal - hence I'm trying to learn a little more admin and begin to steer us down a better path.

Thanks for any input!

Greetings,

To my understanding webdav is an extension of the HTTP protocol to allow the easy transfer of files (other than XHTML/XML) documents. This got me excited in the sense that document management systems can use webdav to integrate a users work flow seamlessly into a web service type environment

To explain, I'd save my word document (if I was a corporate using M$) to my trustee server (just like I do now). Except rather than a file server, this would be a webdav server which would "catch" the document, extract version information and loaded this into the auditing section of the DMS/CMS. Personally I think just using XML as your raw document type would save a lot of hassle

Anyway, to answer your question more clearly. I'm not sure what having webdav support means in Golive. Webdav runs on a server (probably apache and yes setup by your admin), and you can connect to this server from *any* application. It seems to me this is just marketing and I can't see how bulit-in webdav support helps you without a webdav server

I use textpad and zend studio for development, and connect via secure shell to my servers. When you are transfering text (which html/xml/js/php is) webdav wont transfer data much faster than SSH or even HTTP, it is only when you get larger files that webdav is *supposed* to be able to transfer them almost the same speed as copying them to your file server. So I wouldn't worry if I were you

In terms of version control this takes some real experience to get right, but it is based on some simple guide lines. Break up your development into releases and each release gets a version (eg 1.4). Each release has release notes explaining what is in the release and what is changed. A release consists of a series of scripts/db rollout. Each script also needs to be versioned, and you always need to record changes made. This should get you started in the right track. Then check out cvs if you want to get more advanced, this is the version control system used by php itself and many other open source packages. It really depends on the size of the job.

Good Luck

Opps that cvs link is http://www.cvshome.org/

Thanks Zitan for your response. While you might think you didn't quite answer my vague question, you did - your answer reinforced some of my own ideas.

After looking over your response and doing a bit more research, what I have decided is that I am more than anything looking for an easy mechanism to check in/out files as the first step. We are currently using Visual Source Safe because most of our apps were written in Visual Interdev on the Windows platform, and I'm assuming the admins decided to use VSS because of the tight integration. Problem is, we are now developing on some Linux boxes and VSS is breaking every now and again on the Windows side, so the reaction is "replace VSS", while I don't think we ever actually used it correctly. On top of that CVS type discussions are floating around, so I'm looking to make sure that I understand both the admin and programmer side of the equation.

So it looks like over the upcoming holidays I'm going to do a little bit of administration of my own on a test server and act like I'm 4 or more programmers.

Glad to be of assistance

Version Control and check-in/check-out is important, but remember it comes from good release strategy on your own behalf to begin with. Good luck and let me know how you get on, because I always interested in a good VCS.