The web's hyperlinks are notoriously brittle, and break whenever a resource migrates. One solution to this problem is a transparent resource migration mechanism, which separates a resource's location from its identity, and helps provide referential integrity. However, although several such mechanisms have been designed, they have not been widely adopted, due largely to a lack of compliance with current web standards. In addition, these mechanisms must be updated manually whenever a resource migrates, limiting their effectiveness for large web sites. Recently, however, new web protocols such as WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) have emerged, which extend the HTTP protocol and provide a new level of control over web resources. In this paper, we show how we have used these protocols in the design of a new Resource Migration Protocol (RMP), which enables transparent resource migration across standard web servers. The RMP works with a new resource migration mechan...
Michael P. Evans, Steven Furnell