Milton is an open source java library for implementing desktop integration in your web apps with WEBDAV. For those not familiar with WEBDAV, its like FTP but implemented in HTTP. Its a mature standard and supported natively in all operating systems. Once integrated, your users can view and/or manipulate remote data in your application using drag and drop of files and folders in their native OS file browser - eg Windows Explorer, Nautilus, etc, over HTTP. Milton is agnostic of the nature of your data and can be used with any type of persistence mechanism, including hibernate, JPA, etc. Milton can be integrated easily into most web apps by implementing a Resource interface and a ResourceFactory, and adding the Milton servlet to web.xml. Milton allows you to specify which http methods to support (eg DELETE, PUT, MKCOL, etc). HTTP authentication and authorisation are delegated to your application logic. Milton is not bound to the Servlet API, so it can easily be integrated into alternative web servers. See Milton home for details: http://milton.ettrema.com/index.html

Hi, I want check out the source and build it ,but I can't find the scm repository location,could you tell me where to check out the source? Thanks.

Hi Yang, Sorry, there's no SCM access at the moment. The source is available on the downloads page as Milton-src-1.1.zip Apologies in advance, however, for the build script. I'll have a portable version ready in a couple of days. Cheers

Ok,it will must be better if there's any SCM. I will often focus on this project. Thanks.

Ok,it will must be better if there's any SCM.
I will often focus on this project.
Thanks.

Hi Yang, If you'd like to email me from the milton contact page i can let you know when the SCM is ready. Should be this week. Cheers, Brad

Hi,brad: The viewpoint that I want to express is the SCM not only for me,but should for everyone. I am very interested in OSS and I had a bookmark for the projet, but recently maybe I have few time on this project,but as before I said ,anyway,I will follow the project state and I will know when the SCM is ready in time,please trust me. :-) Exactily ,the project is a very good and exciting job. Thanks.

Subversion repository is now available: svn://www.ettrema.com/milton Cheers, Brad

Last time I tried to use it, both the server and client sides were flaky. Can you use it reliably these days? Could you use Windows' built in "web folder" explorer with this software and expect it to be trouble free?

Thanks for pointing that out. Its fixed now

(Sorry, that previous reply was meant for the downloads comment) Yes and no. Windows Vista has a broken webdav client but Linux, Mac and Windows XP work well. I'm not sure about earlier versions of windows, but there is also a very good third party tool for windows called Novel Netdrive. I've found that nautilus on linux works well, but mounting webdav in the filesystem is flaky. The Mac webdav client appears to be the best of all. There is a MS KB patch for Vista which, sadly, users must install for it to work. MS Office and Open Office also have built in webdav clients which work well. So, for example, you can open a spreadhsheet from a url (use the file open dialog) and edit it online

Yes and no. Windows Vista has a broken webdav client but Linux, Mac and Windows XP work well. I'm not sure about earlier versions of windows, but there is also a very good third party tool for windows called Novel Netdrive.

I've found that nautilus on linux works well, but mounting webdav in the filesystem is flaky.

The Mac webdav client appears to be the best of all.

There is a MS KB patch for Vista which, sadly, users must install for it to work.

MS Office and Open Office also have built in webdav clients which work well. So, for example, you can open a spreadhsheet from a url (use the file open dialog) and edit it online

My experience on Windows XP is that WebDAV falls flat. Microsoft does not make WebDAV mounts look like a normal file at an API level. Even in Office apps some menu items work with WebDAV (e.g. open) and some fail miserably (e.g. export). Pick an application other than Office or an Adobe product and you can bet it won't be able to direction open from or save to WebDAV. If WebDAV was treated in a manner akin to a virtual file system (e.g. NFS), it would be fantastic. The server side protocol support appears to all be there and some clients, e.g. the Mac, supposedly get it right. The biggest client, Windows falls on its face in this area, though. I believe this is somewhat intentional on Microsoft's part -- they don't really want easy seamlessly interaction with non-Windows content servers.

Yeah, it was very disappointing to see MS take a big backward step in webdav support from XP to Vista. I don't see webdav replacing network filesystems for some time. However, webdav is very useful for interacting with websites. Being able to do normal file and folder operations on a live website is intuitive for unskilled users and convenient for admins. Such as using drag and drop to load hundreds of images and videos onto a website, moving and renaming folders, deleting files, etc. All of which is much easier in windows explorer then any browser based interface. And with Milton the resources being managed don't even need to be physical files and folders. They can be rows in a database or even representations of business objects, for example.

Sounds like a very useful library to me. Synchronizing your application datamodel and the content repository has always been a problem. Ability to expose your application datamodel (or a combination of datamodel and filesystem) as webdav is a very interesting idea.

I would also like to point TSS people to a very nice client-side WebDav library : WebDavClient4J. Have a look at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/webdavclient4j The website is a bit raw, but this is THE library to use on the client-side. Peace...

Am I missing something here or is this a post from year 2000? Tomcat has always distributed WebDav extension since 2001.

If the folder structure of your webdav has to be based on the data of your application datamodel, how would you do that in tomcat?

Hi Kumar, Yes, Tomcat provides webdav access to data on your file system. But Milton allows access via webdav to any data. For example, you could use it to implement webdav in Amazon's S3, or add it to a CRM system, or even use it to allow browsing of your emails via IMAP. And, of course, you could use it for a CMS. Cheers

Download link at milton.ettrema.com doesn't work. Thanks, Anthony

Open source webdaw API is always a great thing

 the stork club movie

awesome!Milton is great

sell sheet designer