An Application for WebDAV-based Authoring of Databases - WebDAD

We propose a new approach to accessing databases through the Web that is based on the WebDAV protocol (Web based Distributed Authoring and Versioning). This paper introduces an extensible framework for WebDAV based authoring of databases, whether relational or object oriented, called WebDAD. WebDAD is a mapping of SQL database operations onto an HTTP URL namespace, and WebDAV protocol operations. This is the first peer reviewed presentation on mapping SQL to WebDAV, and provides an insight into the similarities and differences between the WebDAV and SQL database approaches for managing data. The WebDAV protocol has been chosen as a foundation for WebDAD, since it is the first protocol for distributed authoring. Also, WebDAV advantages such as metadata and access control make it a better candidate of being the layout protocol for database transactions rather than HTTP. standard language in order to extract the database metadata and it is vendor dependent, WebDAV is a better candidate of being the layout protocol for database transactions rather than HTTP. Indeed, the WebDAV access control presents controls on databases via WebDAV permissions, and improves that access control in some databases. In the following, we extend a WebDAV support application to support the database data model. Indeed, a primitive subset of SQL statements, which can be shown to be relatively complete in the context of the WebDAD framework is specified. Each SQL statement is translated based on the taxonomy of the WebDAV methods. Although WebDAV is the best layout for authoring, however WebDAV methods are mostly intended to support file system resources and as an aside, some shortages are observed to support other Web resources such as databases.