<p>Is there any way to have something that looks just like a file on a Windows file share, but is really a resource served up over HTTP?</p>
<p>For context, I'm working with an old app that can only deal with files on a Windows file share, I want to create a simple HTTP-based service to serve the content of the files dynamically to pick up real time changes to the underlying data on request.</p>

[{'answer_id': 24437, 'author': 'Mike Powell', 'author_id': 205, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/205', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>This won\'t answer your question in any meaningful way, but maybe it will get you pointed in the right direction.  Look into serving the "file(s)" via WebDAV--SharePoint uses this and its files can be accessed exactly as you want, as a file share where the transport mechanism is HTTP.  Unfortunately I can\'t give any more detailed info, as I\'ve only worked on the client end of WebDAV and not the server side of things. </p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 24795, 'author': 'Joel Lucsy', 'author_id': 645, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/645', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>I think serving up files from WebDAV might be what you're looking for.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 24841, 'author': 'Mark Brackett', 'author_id': 2199, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2199', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>WebDAV (basically) takes an existing directory, and shares it over HTTP - which sounds like the opposite of what you want. </p>\n\n<p>You need something that speaks SMB/CIFS on one end, and your own code on the other. The easiest way to do that is with a userspace file system.</p>\n\n<p>To that end, here\'s a couple of links:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li><a href="http://www.palissimo.de/index.php?c=6" rel="nofollow noreferrer">WinFUSE</a>, which is kind of a barebones CIFS/SMB server that can host your own filesystem. I\'ve done a couple of small samples with it - and the docs are terrible, but it more or less worked.</li>\n<li><a href="http://dokan-dev.net/en/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Dokan</a>, a userspace file driver with .NET bindings. I haven\'t used this one, but it looks promising. It has both .NET and Ruby bindings, so you should be able to get a POC up pretty quickly.</li>\n<li><a href="http://www.eldos.com/cbfs/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Callback File System</a> - yet another userspace file system. Again, I have no experience with this one.</li>\n<li>A Linux box with SAMBA and FUSE that shares the drive out to the Windows box.</li>\n</ol>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/24408', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2362/']