Goliath is an application designed for the authoring and management of resources (files, folders, etc) stored on a web server. It uses a protocol called WebDAV to perform this management. WebDAV is an extenstion to HTTP, which is what web browsers use to communicate with web servers. Ultimately, WebDAV will allow for users to author files physically residing on web site as if they were files on their own computer. In addition to this benefit, users have the ability to lock files that they are currently working on to prevent other users from overwriting any changes that they are making to the file. Other benefits include namespace manipulation (thats Copy and Move), viewing and setting of properties, faster connections with Socket Keep-Alive, and secure HTTP connections via SSL. In the future, benefits will include a query language (DASL), Access Control Rules and integration with version control systems.
Clients that claim to use HTTP for accessing web servers often do so in a non-standrard or hacked way by either relying on directory index pages produced by a server, or by scanning for hypertext links inside of web pages and displaying these links. This is incorrect for authoring purposes since HTTP is designed primarily for read-only access (WebDAV is intended to address these deficiencies).
Finally, Goliath is Free Software and it's source code is available. For these and many other reasons, the use of Goliath and other WebDAV enabled clients is preferable to using FTP clients like Anarchie, Fetch and NetFinder.
As a project, Goliath is a moving target with frequent releases. If there are features that are desirable or bugs found in the latest version, a forum does exist to discuss these issues. There is mailing list , and please feel free to e-mail me personally if you feel the topic is outside the scope of the mailing list.
Currently, Goliath is tested against against a number of different DAV servers.
Regarding compatibility, I am more than willing to fix bugs with respect to server compatibility in these and other servers; drop me a line and let me know.
Look at these directions
The underlying WebDAV library used by Goliath is available as a separate download at http://www.webdav.org/goliath/davlib.html. DAVLib is writen in C++ and should be relativly easy to integrate into other software products. It is currently licensed under the GNU General Public License; if this license does not meet your needs, please contact me to make other arrangements. I am very interested in promoting and enabling the acceptance of WebDAV on the MacOS; it is my goal that DAVLib is utilized in other applications.
A short list of future plans include tighter integration with authoring applications, improved SSL support and better support for drag&drop within web sites.
Version 0.9 includes support for Macintosh Resource forks. The short answer is that Goliath deals with them in roughly the same manner as the built-in WebDAV client found in Mac OS X - so files uploaded with either client should be compatible with both. The long answer is that Goliath uses the Apple-Double file encoding, in which the data fork is contained in one file and a specially encoded version of the resource fork is contained in a second file (hence the name Apple-Double). The data fork is stored in a file that is the same name as the Macintosh dual-forked file. The encoded resources are in a file that is prefixed with '._' and then contains the name of the original macintosh file. Goliath deals with the fact that there are 2 files on a WebDAV server transparently; it will construct these files on upload and rebuild the MacOS dual-forked file on download.
Check out this HOWTO
By default, Goliath can only communicate with WebDAV servers over SSL IF they have certificates from Verisign or Thawte. This limitation will be removed in future versions of Goliath. In the interim, check out this post to the Goliath mailing list that detail a potential work-around
Last updated on 10/04/2002 by Tom Bednarz
(c)1999-2002, Thomas Bednarz