What WebDAV Enables

I have lots of ideas for iPhone apps. Ideas, of course, are a dime a dozen unless you execute on them. When I choose an app idea to execute, I base that choice on what I can do with a reasonable level of effort since I have to fit it into my free time. That means that I've shelved all of the ideas that require a WebDAV client.

All sorts of things would benefit from writing to or reading from a network-accessible filesystem, from a simple TODO list (I'd considered implementing TaskPaper, for example) to a game with user-generated levels. I'm thinking in terms of WebDAV for a few reasons:

• MobileMe's iDisk is a WebDAV filesystem
• So is a subversion server
• WebDAV works equally well over a VPN, through a proxy, to a remote server, or over a LAN
• There are already a number of iPhone apps that provide a WebDAV share

The problem is that no suitable WebDAV library exists. There are C codebases that might do the job (e.g. neon and cadaver), but they are licensed under the GPL. That's an inconvenient license for software going into a commercial iPhone app. Here's a list of requirements to define what I consider suitable:

• Its license must be MIT, BSD, Apache, LGPL, or something similarly non-viral and free.
• It must be based on the NSURL* class family so that it picks up and uses the iPhone's current proxy settings. ASIHTTP* is not acceptable.
• It must provide a reasonably simple Objective-C interface to:
  • reading files
  • writing files (guaranteeing, by default, atomicity via both explicit WebDAV locking and ETags)
  • listing directories (including files' MIME types)
  • reading byte ranges, i.e. partial file reading
• It must be easy to build a static fat library for iPhone, iPad, and simulator, preferably because the source is delivered with an Xcode project file

If anyone is interested in implementing and licensing such a library according to the requirements above, I'll offer a bounty of US$50. If I get enough (non-anonymous) comments on this post with pledges to increase that bounty to a total of $200 or more, I'll set up a bounty fund and open it to contributions.

To claim the bounty, comment on this post with an URL pointing to your repository on Sourceforge, Google Code, Github, or something similar and I'll check it out. Payment will probably be via Paypal.

Yes, I feel a little silly offering a bounty when I could implement it myself, but since I haven't found the time in the course of nearly two years, I don't see that changing. This way, we can all benefit. Enjoy!

Update! Apache Jackrabbit includes an Apache-licensed (of course) WebDAV client library... in Java. A port might be easier than starting from scratch.