Chungles has been split up in to core functionality (a dumb server) and UI/Generic plugins. SWT and console UIs are now plugins, in separate modules on the repository. Several things need to be tweaked for the whole plugin framework, but for the most part, it's done and working and rather simple to use, in my opinion.

As for the WebDAV plugin, progress is coming along great. It's nearing completion as I have it successfully listing files using the OS X built-in DAV filesystem driver, Nautilus and CaDAVer on Linux, and Windows Vista's mini-redirector. Windows XP's mini-redirector, however, is giving me some troubles. There are some bugs listed, mostly the port numbers not working, but I suspect there are other bugs in their code, not just mine, since there are issues with the WebDAV testbed. MS apparently has a hotfix, but you have to contact their support to get the files, and they will not have a downloadable update until the next service pack, so unfortunately, my recommendation to get WebDAV on Windows for now is to use Vista.

The WebDAV plugin is done by embedding Jetty, providing it a full webserver, and pages are handled through a servlet, which serves regular HTML pages. So far the GET method is fully implemented, the PROPFIND is almost completely implemented, and the PUT/DELETE methods needs to be implemented before it's entirely functional. Through my work on this plugin as well as the plugin framework for Chungles core, I have worked heavily on a convenience class that treats the Chungles network as a virtual filesystem, which should aid many other plugins, providing simple methods for accessing files and directories through unix-style paths.

I'm now revamping Chungles to be mostly plugins. I've split off the UI to plugins now and I'd like to lay out frameworks for other parts of chungles such as networking (have standard mDNS, manual adding of nodes, samba, multicast, so on), searching (for server end, this will allow basic file searches, regex file searches, metadata searches, so on), and security (encryption and authentication layers as well as ACLs). I'm finishing up the preferences for plugins and much tweaking will be needed to ensure proper classpaths are set and project building is fairly simple.

The plugin system right now loads JARs in to the classpath at runtime via XML configuration inside the JAR. It will search some default locations for JARs, and then load them if an existing classname isn't loaded, then load JARs from the main XML, then write to that XML. I'm working up convenience classes, like the FileSystem class, which will treat the Chungles network as one big hierarchy and allow simple methods to traverse and utilize it. I'm considering adding Javascript support since Java6 now supports Javascript parsing, and possibly PERL for those die-hards.

Finally, I'm working on a plugin that will allow what I've been contemplating how to go about from the start. The plugin is an HTTP-server with WebDAV support. This will allow most platforms to mount the new Chungles hierarchy as a virtual filesystem. Since everything's a plugin, this will be an optional system, and later I can implement native filesystem drivers.