I popped up to OSCon last week for the Wed afternoon CalDAV panel and BOF. I was a little bit surprised and not a little pleased by the standing-room-only attendance at the panel. Things went very well considering the nonexistent amount of detailed planning we’d done - Pieter Hartsook is owed thanks for saving our butts by putting together an agenda and giving us a bit of direction

Observations from the panel:

• I was the only server guy to actually discuss my product’s feature set beyond a general statement of CalDAV support. Unfortunately, because we had not led off the panel with a discussion of what CalDAV actually is, I think some of it went over peoples’ heads :). Still, given the questions I got during the panel and BOF, I’m pretty sure most people got most of what Cosmo has to offer.
• Pretty much all of the other server teams are approaching their products as web applications (presumably on top of SQL databases) that speak CalDAV out the side, whereas we at OSAF are building the protocol server and web application separately, using CalDAV to communicate between the two. You’ll be able to aim Scooby at the UW Calendar and Hula servers, but it’s not clear if you’ll be able to aim one of these servers or WebCalendar at Cosmo.
• In general, the problems that people are having are more complex than the ones we implementers are able to solve at the moment. We’re still getting our feet under us, just becoming able to get and put events interoperably between multiple clients and servers, but the audience asked hard questions about enterprise integration, complex calendaring problems and and advanced scheduling features that we’re very far from being able to address. We’re happy just to have gotten this far (it took ten years to get a calendar access protocol that anybody actually wrote code for), but our users need us to get a lot farther real fast.
• Calendar web applications are popular. Seems like everybody’s working on one. It’s going to be interesting to see how the multiple projects differentiate themselves.

I’m looking forward to ApacheCon, where I’ll hopefully have an hour to explain a lot more about CalDAV and about Cosmo, including why it’s different and more interesting than the other guys’ servers