WebDAV Server

[Alan Kennedy]

[Jody Winston]
> I'd like to present a view of an internal data store, which has Python
> interface built using SWIG, so that my users can traverse and
> manipulate the data store using familiar tools.  

Have you considered using something like pythonfs: "Linux Filesystem 
Drivers for backends written in Python"?

http://pythonfs.sourceforge.net/

Your backend could be your swig-wrapped internal data store. Then your 
users could use familiar file management tools on your data store.

It could be exposed to a web server as the document root of the server: 
which would be nice because you could pick any standard webserver and 
not require it to be in python: every webserver understands filesystems.

Same argument applies to webdav, i.e. you could use a native webdav 
module for, say, Apache, layered over your data-store "filesystem".

[Jody Winston]
> My first thought was
> to adapt an existing WebDAV server.  

I'm not sure that adapting someone elses webdav component would be the 
most appropriate solution. Most such modules will likely apply their own 
semantics to webdav methods and properties, which are relevant only to 
their own intended storage mechanism. Take, for example, the subversion 
module for apache, which has webdav support. But it performs all webdav 
operations directly on the contents of a subversion repository, which 
has versioning, branching, labelling semantics, etc.

If you just wanted a read-only view of your data store, I would suggest 
using a web framework such as quixote to map uris to your 
(hierarchical?) data store somehow. Quixote is structured around the 
concept of mapping uris to python objects in a straightforward and 
configurable manner, so it might be a good fit. You could then extend 
the model to support PUT, POST, HEAD, OPTIONS, etc, methods as well. By 
which time you would have implemented a significant proportion of WEBDAV :-)

Which leads onto the question: what operations do you intend to 
facilitate on your data store? What kinds of tools do you wish to allow 
people to use to access it, and what kinds of operations should those 
tools support?

For instance, if your data is more relational than hierarchical, it 
might be more appropriate to write an ODBC front-end for your datastore?

regards,

-- 
alan kennedy
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email alan:              http://xhaus.com/contact/alan