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Ask HN: Is WebDav still relevant?

80 points by devj ↗ HN
Has it been abandoned totally?

It would be really helpful if anybody who has used WebDav can actually share their experience on what worked and what didn't work for them?

59 comments

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superflit
YES,

It is done and finished.

Webdav was mostly used to provide "easy" access to webdevelopers where at time were using IDEs for Flash (Macromedia) and HTML (Frontpage).

Once they finished from the IDE they upload the files.

But webdav is a mess to setup (servers and permissions) and was deprecated to better protocols (ssh, scp).

vorpalhex
I still see it as an option in some places, but I don't ever see it used.

It had a lot of promise, but very poor actual implementation. I'd still like to see a generalized, cross-platform replacement for SMB/NFS/CIFS.

LinuxBender
It is still compiled into nginx by default. That is one of the reasons I have to compile it myself. That would suggest a number of people still use it.
sp332
You compile it yourself in order to disable WebDav?
LinuxBender
Yes. I remove about a dozen modules. If I can leave out code I do not use, then future vulns around that code won't apply to me. The code is still present even if it is not enabled in the configuration.

I also compile it for other reasons, including getting the latest version and applying all the libc hardening options and using the latest pcre. I do this for about a dozen internet facing daemons. It takes about 9 minutes for all my packages to compile.

nickpsecurity
Smart move. That technique was used in the Poly2 project among others:

https://www.cerias.purdue.edu/assets/pdf/bibtex_archive/0125...

http://projects.cerias.purdue.edu/poly2/

Ever since I saw eCos OS, I wanted every OS to come with both the ability and a GUI tool to just check off all the features I want, compile kernel with just those features, and create installer for that kernel. Current tech in repos should even let one create that configuration automatically based on what packages they wanted or have already installed in a sample system (eg bare metal or VM). Could also use program analysis where features are dropped if they're not called and/or info from security policies like SELinux for further constraints.

takluyver
CalDAV, which is an extension of WebDAV, is widely used for read-write access to a remote calendar. I don't know of any other protocol which is replacing this, although there are bound to be some that technically could. Google, Apple and open source projects like the 'Lightning' Thunderbird extension support CalDAV, at least in part.
Rjevski
iCloud contacts & calendars are still CardDAV/CalDAV under the hood.
chrismorgan
> I don't know of any other protocol which is replacing this

JMAP: https://jmap.io/spec.html.

The core and mail specifications are where the focus is, and they’re what’s currently approaching standardisation in the IETF, but there are also the calendar and contact specifications in progress, which are designed to replace CalDAV and CardDAV. I don’t think they’re getting a great deal of attention now, while core and mail are finalised, but once those are done I expect more attention will come to them. (In the mean time, I believe we’ll be speaking the calendar and contact JMAP drafts in FastMail when we switch over to JMAP.)

The ability to do everything over one protocol instead of at least four—IMAP, SMTP, CalDAV and CardDAV—is one of the nice things about JMAP.

ocdtrekkie
Out of curiosity, have any of the major providers stepped up and talked about supporting JMAP yet, or demonstrated interest? As someone well out there in third party client land, I can't very well expect to find many JMAP clients out there for my random-given-platform if your Googles, Microsofts and Oaths(Yahoo/AOL) aren't on board. (Obligatory <3 FastMail)
nmjenkins
We have been speaking with engineers at most of the large mailbox providers and server developers for many years, and made changes to the JMAP spec based on their feedback to make sure it can work for them. You will also find feedback and contributions on the IETF mailing list from some of them. We can’t speak for another company’s product plans however.
_wmd
The Subversion HTTP protocol is WebDaV, so it is most certainly a living standard. Microsoft Office (used to?) support WebDAV URLs in its open dialog, I imagine that's still the case. I'm pretty sure it sees wide use in Microsoft stuff come to think of it. FrontPage used to use it, Sharepoint uses it(?). I suspect some more of their non-Office authoring tools

Oh - hell - yes, and Microsoft IIS. That was a big user back in the day, again for FrontPage integration, but you could use it generically too

And of course, Windows and OS X still support mounting WebDAV URLs as drives.

edit: it ain't going anywhere: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/implementation.html

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orf
IIRC all Windows open dialogs support WebDAV browsing and opening.

It's actually pretty neat.

DaiPlusPlus
Windows will download the file to a temporary location (while blocking the UI thread for this!) and then pass the path of that temporary file to the application. It works but is far from perfect - I won’t be surprised if it drops support for that little trick in a near release of Windows. I still want to know why Windows supports this yet still doesn’t ship with a native command-like equivalent to curl or wget (PowerShell doesn’t count)
sarah180
Why wouldn't PowerShell count? It's the standard scripting and command environment for modern versions of Windows.

As of Windows 10, Microsoft has even phased out cmd.exe from the menus and for shortcuts like Win+X. It's still possible to get the legacy environment back, but it's exactly that: a legacy environment.

cuspycode
Yes, I have used it to mount document servers as remote drives via WebDAV, and then use standard Unix one-liners to do queries and updates. Much more convenient than working with custom APIs.

I also once integrated an open-source WebDAV server into my own code, in order to expose parts of an SQL database as a remotely mountable filesystem. This would have taken much more effort without the existing WebDAV infrastructure.

amiga-workbench
When I was shopping around for a Sony Digital Paper tablet I noticed that the original model did in fact support WebDav, I thought that would be ideal, I could have all my notes dump themselves onto the office NAS without any additional proprietary shitware getting involved.
benwilber0
WebDAV is still one of the main protocols for pushing HLS live streams to CDNs
neilsimp1
It's still used for a project with another team at my work. For some reason, regular old FTP wasn't good enough for deployment, so this is what they use. They use Microsoft Expression Web 4 to upload/download files, which itself is no longer supported, I believe.
phaer
One of the reason I'd prefer WebDAV to FTP from an operational perspective is that WEBDAV needs just one port open whereas FTP needs either connection tracking, which does not work with TLS, or an open port range for its passive connections.
[dead] originalsimba
NextCloud uses it. It's very useful to synchronize your calendar and contacts between your private cloud storage and your mobile device.

So... yes?

budu3
I believe Adobe's CMS, Adobe Experience Manager, supports WebDAV.
tootie
Not for anything useful. I've done a bunch of installs and webdav was never part of the implementation.
_b8r0
Erm, I hope it is. My Nextcloud uses WebDav, CalDav, CardDav and a whole host of other things to sync everything from files to bookmarks and calendar appointments.
gerdesj
Absolutely! Nextcloud and Owncloud both use WebDAV. I have a couple of TB on one Netxcloud with a few dozen users and a few 100GB on another with >600 users.
veddox
Yep, using WebDav with Nextcloud too - much nicer to use than the official desktop client, IMO.
confounded
It works great. Implementations are badly missing a standard MFA mechanism.
theandrewbailey
Salesforce Commerce Cloud uses client side certificates (in addition to username + password) on WebDAV uploads. They're a pain to set up, but clients aren't too painful to use with them.
kwk1
Yes, I use Zotero (a reference manager) which uses WebDav for file sync to a Nextcloud server. You can also use davfs to mount a Nextcloud share.
mfer
The short answer is Yes.

WebDAV provides a foundation that many things are built on. As others have noted there is CalDAV and CardDAV that many use all the time.

But, it goes beyond that. WebDAV has many of the features we regularly use in object storage. Yet, object storage provides often have their own proprietary API or clone someone elses proprietary API. WebDAV is an open spec.

Because WebDAV has been around for so long, there are integration's with just so many things which make it easy to get something going out of the gate. For example, all the major OS support working with it.

Not only is it relevant for this but with all the discussions on reviving more of the open web... this is a piece worth looking at.

ocdtrekkie
One thing I find funny is that Windows does support CalDAV and CardDAV, but only via the fact that they support iCloud. Getting my FastMail contacts into a Windows 10 device required that I create a fake iCloud account, and then edit the server address to point at FastMail and put in the correct credentials.
stephenr
This is an interesting take, I've talked previously about using SVN as the underlying backing store for a versioned object store (using the auto versioning feature to allow plain webdav writes), and of course plain webdav is the 'unversioned' companion service for that.
ComodoHacker
Yandex Disk cloud storage service uses it as a main protocol. They have added some proprietary extensions for their native client, but simple mounting also works.
tootie
No. And I'm surprised by all the other comments. There are some big systems still using CalDav but the promise of WebDav as read-write version of HTTP got very little adoption and the dev community stopped talking about it years ago.
irq-1
WebDav never replaced SMB/CIFS/NFS and is mostly implemented by few websites.

It's unreliable; a tangle of half-implemented standards and incompatible clients, and it's uninteresting as a file system that lacks basic features, like locking, server-side search, etc...

mtve
Seconded this thread, don't understand all other laudatory threads.

Tried again recently, Windows 10 with latest apache webserver fails hard on simple tests.

Some technologies must just die and disappear.

theandrewbailey
I work with Salesforce Commerce Cloud all day. HTTP(S) is the only protocol you can talk to it with, so WebDAV is used constantly to upload code and product images. It's not painful to use, but when PCI requirements made TLS 1.2 mandatory, we had to look around for upload clients that supported WebDAV over TLS 1.2 specifically.
voodootrucker
WebDAV is a fantastic file system for the web. It comes built in with auto-resume (content-range header), and in a world where everything but HTTP and HTTPS ports are blocked, I see it as increasingly useful.
Madmallard
I took this to mean a mispelling of webdev and was giggling at the thought of hackernews being so far ahead of the curve and/or hipster that someone outright asks that question. I was sad to not see responses entertaining the idea.
cncrnd
I've been doing some web davalopment and can say that React and Node have worked for me, a web davaloper.
shakkhar
If you were trying to be funny, the humor did not come through. Puns often get lost in text.
oedmarap
Cryptomator[0] uses WebDAV to locally mount its encrypted vaults natively in the operating system.

Also provides vault URLs so you can use third-party clients if need be on a local (and configurable) port.

[0] https://cryptomator.org

rubenbe
I really like the simplicity of WebDAV especially when combined with Docker. HTTP just works.

Have you ever tried to properly set up samba or NFS in a container?