
Ask HN: Is WebDav still relevant? - devj
Has it been abandoned totally?<p>It would be really helpful if anybody who has used WebDav can actually share their experience on what worked and what didn&#x27;t work for them?
======
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.

------
_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](https://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/implementation.html)

~~~
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)

~~~
WorldMaker
Windows ships with native curl(.exe) now [1]. (Though PowerShell is great, and
I think it counts, personally.)

[1]
[https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2017/12/1...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2017/12/19/tar-
and-curl-come-to-windows/)

~~~
tootie
Curl has had a Windows version for a while but they used to alias curl to
Invoke-WebRequest which was super irritating. I just use curl via WSL now.

------
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.

~~~
chrismorgan
> _I don 't know of any other protocol which is replacing this_

JMAP: [https://jmap.io/spec.html](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.

------
mrmekon
Apparently, according to this thread, WebDAV is alive and thriving.

CalDAV and CardDAV are certainly alive, but I think they're in a pretty
horrible place.

I run a Radicale server, which seems very nice, but configuring clients is a
nightmare. Every client seems to require different settings, and work to
differing degrees.

The native Contacts/Calendar apps on OS X were the worst. They connect, work
for a few hours or days, and then permanently break. I have to delete and re-
add the accounts over and over again until eventually the same settings
suddenly work, and they work for some hours or days, and then break again.

Thunderbird consistently works, as does Android's DAVdroid, but other clients
I've tried have been almost-hit-or-completely-miss.

emacs –– _EMACS_ –– has terrible support. This might not sounds like much,
what with it being a text editor and all, but this is exactly the sort of
place where it usually has 15 different implementations, 2 or 3 of which are
really nice. Instead, it's riddled with XML parsing errors, the biggest CalDAV
client deletes all of your TODO entries, and there doesn't seem to be a single
CardDAV library. I take this as a sign that those protocols are not being
widely embraced.

That said, when they work they are truly fantastic. I don't particularly care
about the underlying protocol, but I pray that CalDAV and CardDAV support gets
more consistent and more popular.

------
iuguy
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
aurorabbit
I've used WebDAV successfully for a client's network storage system.

I use Apache2 + SQLite for the authentication, here is an example
configuration:
[https://gist.github.com/aurorabbit/36c509ddeeba2b97c3019534f...](https://gist.github.com/aurorabbit/36c509ddeeba2b97c3019534f8dbcce9)

I use buildroot for creating a minimal linux install.

------
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](https://cryptomator.org)

------
benwilber0
WebDAV is still one of the main protocols for pushing HLS live streams to CDNs

~~~
nik736
source?

------
Infernal
I use Apache to run WebDAV at home for my various OmniGroup applications - I
like self-hosted cloud/sync services, so I hope OmniGroup continues to support
WebDAV for the forseeable future.

------
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
gaelow
I tried to use it as replacement for ftp for deployment 14 years ago, in part
because I could mount a drive and perform some costly (for a VM at that time)
sanity checks on the deployment. It was OK, but too unstable on that kind of
connection. Now with jenkins, sonar, docker... CI/CD has become way easier.
Also cloud services with a REST API replace pretty much any functionality
offered by WebDAV in a simpler, more efficient, more versatile, more
interoperable and scalable way, so... Not relevant anymore, I think.

------
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.

------
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...](https://www.cerias.purdue.edu/assets/pdf/bibtex_archive/01254339.pdf)

[http://projects.cerias.purdue.edu/poly2/](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.

------
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?

------
0942v8653
I can run WebDAV both client and server on my iPhone, which makes it pretty
convenient to transfer files to and from it.

------
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.

------
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.

------
mylesab
I’m using WebDAV for my OmniPresence Sync (syncing OmniGraffle and
OmniOutliner, OmniFocus, and DEVONThink.

Usually if you have a desktop/mobile application that has a self hosted setup
they are using WebDAV.

------
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.

------
adamnemecek
Look into crdts. Much cleaner, simpler and powerful.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-
free_replicated_data_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-
free_replicated_data_type)

------
unixhero
Short answer: Yes. Refer to all the comments here.

------
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.

------
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.

------
scardine
I don't know anyone using it since Microsoft Frontpage[1] went out of fashion
almost 20 years ago.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage)

------
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).

