A few Months back – I was grousing about WebDav – like many people, I was trying to use Sakai/CTools to handle my Podcasts – which were usually 50-100MB. These files cannot be uploaded – but they can go in via webdav. Seth told me about Cyberduck for Mac OS/X from www.cyberduck.ch and I have been in heaven ever since. Cyberduck supports dav and sftp – and gives me book marks and drag/drop – all in all wonderful. And Cyberduck works wonderfully with Sakai.
I highly recommend Cyberduck to any Mac user using WebDav and Sakai (www.cyberduck.ch).

The long story is that the Sakai webdav is behind the times. Sakai’s WebDav is based on Tomcat 4’s Webdav – The Tomcat WebDav it was probably built and tested with the WebDav clients of 2001. I wrote the initial version of Sakai’s WebDav back in 2002. Chuck Hedrick of Rutgers has put a lot of effort as well as many other folks in the community have worked on improving Sakai’s WebDav over the years. We have dealt with a lot of issues and kept it sort-of working over the years but it is just impossible to keep up with the insane changes to the built-in WebDav clients for Windows and Mac OS/X. Each new release of these desktop operating systems somehow alters their WebDav clients in a way that causes them to not work with Sakai – Grrr.
Sometimes a few developer heros show up and debug the new clients with protocol analyzers and get things clunking along with the new built-in clients.
The problem is that the Mac OS/X Webdav client is there mostly for Mac to talk to MobileMe and the Windows WebDav client is there to talk mostly to SharePoint. So they add trick features here and there and focus most of their testing on *their* client and *their* server.
In order to use Sakai – we just need to get off the upgrade merry-go-round that happens with these built-in clients. Instead, go with a separate WebDav client like Cyberduck. The motivation for these clients is different – they want to work with all the WebDav servers – so they make more conservative use of the WebDav protocols. Also these folks test across multiple systems so they catch subtle incompatibilities and find a way to work with both systems.
I tried Goliath on the Mac – but it is just too old and clunky and has not been actively updated. Cyberduck is the answer on the Mac – I don’t use a PC for teaching so I don’t know what to do on a PC
P.S. Once of the great wins in moving to Jackrabbit in 3akai is the fact that we will get a brand-new super-fast and fully compliant webdav – written, tested, and maintained by the Jackrabbit team. Yay!