Hey there,

My is Michael Gannon and I'm a 4th yr Computer student studying in
Limerick, Ireland. For my FYP (Final Year Project) I have decided to
write a WebDAV Client in XUL. I've cross-posted this because of bug
13383.

I first came across the Mozilla project back in Feb 1999 when I was
working for a company called XML Workshop where I helped develop an
educational tool called Fabula. I am pretty competent with XUL/JS/C++
but for the past few weeks, I have been trying to get to grips with
Necko and XPCOM and its related technologies. I've also being looking
at Chatzilla and trying to understand how that uses the underlying
XPCOM components.

WebDAV is a protocol which allows users to write to files over HTTP
aswell as read, and also allow users to manipulate resource namespaces
i.e. copy/move/delte files. It allows for something equivalent to an
Internet file system. It is basically a set of extensions to HTTP, and
the body of the HTTP requests are in XML.

I see two ways of going about doing the project:
1. Similar to Chatzilla, using sockets to talk to the server. e.g.
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/extensions/irc/js/lib/http.js
This seems like a fairly messy way of doing things, and that there
should be a better way to do it using one the nsIHTTP* components, but
I haven't been able to figure out how.

2. Extending the functionality of the underlying C++ code to handle
the extra commands. At present this seems like a fairly big task, and
I'm not sure if I'll have time to do it - although it would be nice.
I'm presuming its a bit more work than just adding the extra commands
to nsHttpAtomList.cpp

Basically, I would like advice on which way to proceed from here.

Cheers in advance,
Michael.

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