WebDav

I did not realize that you could mount a webdav folder as a drive on your computer. For example WebDrive does this. According to this article even XP SP3 can do it out-of-the-box (SP2 has some issues, see here). This makes remote documents easy to understand for users. (In my pet applications the users are used to shared drive for all their documents. Versioning? They use backup & restore ;-)

I need a simple WebDav implementation that redirects to a folder on the server. This way I can easily link to files from my web application. My hope is that users can also save the files they open this way (should be the case). Perhaps I will use Tomcat's webdav sample application, although I need to direct the content to/from another folder as the web application's root - which is not that easy. According to this blog it is possible using a JNDI factory.

Instead of Tomcat I could use a library like JackRabbit or an application like Alfresco, but they are too heavy. (btw in my experience you should be very careful integration another application into your own). Missing using Tomcat's implementation would be a search engine - which is supported by the two above, although i'm not sure whether JackRabbit would index Word documents out of the box. (btw I do know that JspWiki can search through Word Documents using Lucene)