Transmit

Transmit is a commercial WebDAV (as well as sftp and ftp) client for OS/X. It can either browse WebDAV sites in a simple browser, but it's also capable of mounting WebDAV drives using MacFuse.

Implementor notes

Transmit 4 had issues with multiple namespace declarations (DAV: appeared twice). This bug was promised to be fixed in a next version of Transmit, but it's also fixed in SabreDAV since 1.2.0beta1.

Transmit's client is much better than the built-in OS/X one. It makes far less request, as it seems to buffer all modifications for a while. Because of this it's much more responsive uses far less HTTP requests / bandwidth.

Chunked Request Body problem

Transmit suffers from the same issue as the OS/X client, where it sends all HTTP PUT requests as 'Chunked' transfer encoding. This is not supported by many servers, such as lighttpd and nginx, as well as using apache + fastcgi.

If you plan to support Transmit you are strongly adviced to just use apache + mod_php.

Protocol details

Transmit uses the following user agent:

• WebDAVFS/1.2.7 (01278000) Transmit/4.0 neon/0.29.3

Transmit first does an OPTIONS request on the url, and then a propfind only requesting the {DAV:}resourcetype property.

Once it's sure it's dealing with a collection, it requests the following properties (depth: 1):

• {DAV:}creationdate
• {DAV:}getcontentlength
• {DAV:}getlastmodified
• {DAV:}resourcetype

When transmit is used to mount the webdav share, the following ueragent is used:

• WebDAVFS/1.2.7 (01278000) TransmitFSHelper/1.0 neon/0.29.3

It requests for the same properties as before, as well as the following:

• {DAV:}quota-available-bytes
• {DAV:}quota-used-bytes
• {DAV:}quota
• {DAV:}quota-used

The last 2 are non-standard.

Transmit (or OS/X) also seems to create a .Trashes folder as soon as the connection is made.