But, people working on DAV have had goals which extend beyond simple web page authoring. Some view DAV as a network filesystem suitable for the Internet, one that works on entire files at a time, with good performance in high-latency environments. Others view DAV as a protocol for manipulating the contents of a document management system via the Web. An important goal of DAV is to support virtual enterprises, being the primary protocol supporting a wide range of collaborative applications. Importantly, a major goal is the support of remote software development teams. A final goal of DAV is to leverage the success of HTTP in being a standard access layer for a wide range of storage repositories — HTTP gave them read access, while DAV gives them write access.

Well, the website clains WebDAV in 2 minutes .. I think 10-20 minutes is more realistic :-). A good starter.

Apache2 already comes with mod_dav.