WebDAV seems to be the red-headed stepchild of the protocol world. It’s advocates have long stood in the desert railing against things like FTP for editing files on remote servers. They go on and on about things like it working over port 80 and being much better integrated into Windows, Mac and Linux than FTP.

But, like many who preach in the desert, they’ve been ignored for years for reasons other than their actual message.

However, over the past few years, WebDAV has started gaining traction as the underlying protocol for Subversion repositories over the web and in several other places. That makes this story about a new PHP library for working with WebDAV interesting.

It caught my eye, because I recently set up ALL of my machines to use JungleDisk and to do automatic backups to the WebDAV drives that it provides.

Those WebDAV drives are backed by Amazon’s S3 online disk service, meaning you get an infinite hard drive for storing whatever. Combine that with this new PHP library and you can get simple access to the giant hard drive in the sky for storing and retrieving data, backing things up, etc. Pretty cool in my book.

via PHPDeveloper