Webfs: A Filesystem Built on Top of the Web (opens in new tab)

I'm going to assume you're familiar with Plan9OS's WebFS and 9P Protcol?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9P_(protoco)

I've been kicking around similar ideas (nowhere near implemented) for a while:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if...

This looks really cool.

> If you have ever thought "x can probably be used as a file system"

...you might also want to take a look at Storage Combinators[1]. Not quite the same problem space, but abstracting away a bit from both concrete filesystems and other storage mechanisms to get to a composable abstraction.

Note: I am the primary author, and also taking a good look at WebFS for further inspiration... :-)

[1] https://2019.splashcon.org/details/splash-2019-Onward-papers...

One issue that networked filesystems have is with mutations, especially with multiple writers. WebDAV, NFS, etc. try to address this with locking, but that doesn't allow simultaneous writes, which means it's dangerous to work offline. It's possible to solve this by using an OT or CRDT algorithm behind the scene. This is what we are building into an extension of HTTP called braid (https://braid.news). It could be useful for a web-backed filesystem. It automates synchronization.

I see very little docs and absolutely no fancy info like gifs or videos explaining what it's possible to do with this tool. I see some example folder, but I can't really say the difference between webfs and ipfs. (Just a little feedback, I mean no offence)

You will probably be interested in Peergos [0][1], which at it's lowest level is an encrypted global filesystem also built on IPFS and also only using the block api.

[0] https://github.com/peergos/peergos

[1] https://book.peergos.org

Your page mentions files in a store are identified by a hash of their contents. Does this have any privacy implications?

Can another participant in the network tell what files are in my store? (like a party providing disk space, or someone intercepting my traffic)

ELI5 please.

Where is the data for all of those IPFS hashes stored?

And what ensures that it will persist?

I read you use IPFS. To my knowledge everything on there can be encrypted however not private. Is there a specific way you get around that.

Name is dangerously close to WebNFS.

The rfc is super dumb though. For instance, when handling a PROPFIND request (more or less listing files / folders), it’s not mandatory for the server to honor the Depth header (how many levels are returned). There is also no mechanism for the server to advertise whether or not it’s honoring the Depth header. That means the Depth header is useless because the client has no way to know whether there was only one hierarchy depth or if the server did not honor the Depth header. Therefore, your only option is to always scan the full hierarchy using PROPFIND at each level.

The RFC is full of that kind of crazy gotchas, not to mention the overuse of “MAY” or “SHOULD” which will drive you crazy if you try to implement a client / server.

If you want to go further in insanity, just look at how crazily over engineered the locking mechanism is. I have no words for it.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4918#section-6

Unfortunately, even if you think you implemented the whole rfc correctly, your implementation will work with almost nothing as not that much implementations are any good in the wild. A useful WebDAV implementation must be full of vendor-specific workarounds.

Every single major operating system ships with WebDAV remote filesystem support built in and it works reasonably. Subversion is built out of WebDAV and can be wired to naively auto-commit changes these clients store.

Maybe it's on the decline, but I'd hardly put it as something that "never really found its footing". It is still a decent way to do fileshares over the public internet without sshfs, etc.

That's not really what the link is, though. It's an adaptation layer to turn a random network resource into something that looks like a filesystem.

Ah yes... I implemented Sardine [1] 10 years ago!

At the time, I worked for a large porn company and we couldn't host stuff 'in the cloud' because they didn't allow porn there.

We invested a ton of money into an Isilon NAS to store our image/video content and the best way to get stuff off it over HTTP was via webdav. Unfortunately, there wasn't a good Java client.

So, I built a simple proxy that would accept regular GET requests and on the back end, use webdav to retrieve content from the Isilon. In front of that proxy was our CDN.

Since then, Sardine has been the basis for quite a few other projects.

[1] https://github.com/lookfirst/sardine

A WebDAV file could be used as a WebFS Cell. The locking would allow emulation of the compare-and-swap functionality. The reference HTTP Cell: client and server are way less complicated than WebDAV though, as many here have alluded to.

Someone else described my "httpdirlist" specification as "like WebDAV but better" or "like WebDAV but less messy" (actually I do not remember the exact wording).

Now I see that Wikipedia also lists several alternatives to WebDAV too, but I think httpdirlist is good.

I always thought WebDAV was sabotaged by different players for some reason (e.g. Apple's implementation caused loss of data). "Never attribute to malice", but support was so bad that almost no other conclusion was possible.

I use it every day on Android, Windows and Linux. It found its footing.

Watching now.

1. Thanks for the direct mp4 link.

2. Consider reducing your desktop resolution for webcasts. I can see that there are dialogues open. I can't for the life of me see what's presented in them.