WebDAV based Open Source Collaborative Development Environment

Open source projects are characterized by their distributed developers, openness, and use of a community-based development process. Successful open source projects such as Apache, Linux, and PHP have a web-based Collaborative Development Environment (CDE) that provides source code repository access, knowledge management, discussion lists, bug tracking, and user support. Distributed software development is also increasingly common for commercial software projects, and benefits from using web-based CDEs. GForge, derived from the SourceForge package, is an open web-based CDE that is seeing widespread open source and commercial use. To support remote authoring of web pages and file contents, as well as remote source code access, GForge uses several network protocols, including SSH/SFTP, CVS pserver, and FTP. These protocols inevitably introduce security risks and add administrative work. We modified GForge to eliminate use of FTP, SSH/SFTP, and CVS protocols, using instead a WebDAV-based integration. The new CDE, called Davenport, uses only the HTTP/WebDAV protocol, and HTTP/WebDAV replaces the other protocols without sacrificing functionality. In this paper we describe the architecture and features of Davenport, and show how WebDAV replaces existing network protocols. We discuss the future development directions of CDEs including integration of client side IDEs and using a CDE as a software test bed.