I wonder why i had not known about webDAV, though it has been around for so long. I needed to have the capability to create a document in word and save it directly to a remote server. The solution i had in mind was to use smb/cifs [samba, in this case]. Then a new requirement cropped up, the file was to be stored in a database on the remote server and not in the file server. That meant I had to write my own smb server, which would get the file from word and save it to a database. I was about to start working on this, when i discovered webDAV.
Smb/cifs has a lot of legacy, while webDAV is nascent and promising. And since webDAV is based or rather an extension of HTTP, I decided to try it.
WebDAV made my task very easy, thanks to microsoft for implementing webFolders.
Now i am planning to move most of my documents that i access from multiple location online, and access them via webDAV.
Read more about webDAV at http://www.webdav.org