s3

The s3DAV looks like an interesting project. It is written in Java and exposes the Amazon S3 online storage service via WebDAV. It is promising because it looks like it can seamlessly expose S3 storage to users via most operating system's native WebDAV support. This will make using S3 as simple as using a network drive. Being Java it can run on just about any platform and either operate at the server or client level. If I had the time I would like to add authentication code to the project, it authentication to OpenLDAP/eDirectory and SQL databases would be a very handy feature to have if you wanted to expose the service to a number of users.
 

Anyway one thing that really blew my mind the other day was Amazon's new S3 service. On the surface it seems really simple, a basic web service that provides cheap online storage (US$0.15 per Gigabyte for storage per month). What is exciting is the ramifications, if somebody (like you or I) want to store a lot of information for ourselves or others online there is no need to invest in big servers and fat Internet connections to serve that data. It also means that by design your web applications will scale effortlessly at least in the sense of the data storage mechanism assuming Amazon's server farm is up to the task. I have signed up for an account and read through the documentation and some of the features are pretty nice (access control lists, time sensitive url's and a lot more). There has been very good things said about it on TechCrunch and other places, plus some criticisim for not supporting the very simple XML-RPC protocol (which would have been very nice to have in simple applications).