On Windows, several well-known applications contain integrated WebDAV client functionality, such as Microsoft’s Office,^[61] Adobe’s Photoshop and Dreamweaver programs. They’re able to directly open and save to URLs, and tend to make heavy use of WebDAV locks when editing a file.

Note that while many of these programs also exist for Mac OS X, they do not appear to support WebDAV directly on that platform. In fact, on Mac OS X, the File→Open dialog box doesn’t allow one to type a path or URL at all. It’s likely that the WebDAV features were deliberately left out of Macintosh versions of these programs, since OS X already provides such excellent low-level filesystem support for WebDAV.

cadaver is a bare-bones Unix command-line program for browsing and changing WebDAV shares. Like the Subversion client, it uses the neon HTTP library—not surprisingly, since both neon and cadaver are written by the same author. cadaver is free software (GPL license) and is available at http://www.webdav.org/cadaver/.

Using cadaver is similar to using a command-line FTP program, and thus it’s extremely useful for basic WebDAV debugging. It can be used to upload or download files in a pinch, to examine properties, and to copy, move, lock, or unlock files:

$ cadaver http://host/repos
dav:/repos/> ls
Listing collection '/repos/': succeeded.
Coll: > foobar                                 0  May 10 16:19
      > playwright.el                       2864  May  4 16:18
      > proofbypoem.txt                     1461  May  5 15:09
      > westcoast.jpg                      66737  May  5 15:09

dav:/repos/> put README
Uploading README to '/repos/README':
Progress: [=============================>] 100.0% of 357 bytes succeeded.

dav:/repos/> get proofbypoem.txt
Downloading '/repos/proofbypoem.txt' to proofbypoem.txt:
Progress: [=============================>] 100.0% of 1461 bytes succeeded.

DAV Explorer is another standalone WebDAV client, written in Java. It’s under a free Apache-like license and is available at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~webdav/. It does everything cadaver does but has the advantages of being portable and being a more user-friendly GUI application. It’s also one of the first clients to support the new WebDAV Access Control Protocol (RFC 3744).

Of course, DAV Explorer’s ACL support is useless in this case, since mod_dav_svn doesn’t support it. The fact that both cadaver and DAV Explorer support some limited DeltaV commands isn’t particularly useful either, since they don’t allow MKACTIVITY requests. But it’s not relevant anyway; we’re assuming all of these clients are operating against an autoversioning repository.