bcm at OSCon

August 9th, 2005 at 3:13 pm (2 years, 11 months ago) by Brian Moseley under Chandler Server Development

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 ;)

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6 Responses to “bcm at OSCon”

  1. rjones Says:

    As a WebCalendar developer, I would be extremely interested in any interoperability testing you might have planned. We currently have a WebDav-like interface that allows full sync with Sunbird and Apple Ical. It’s still in CSV, but looks good.

    Ray Jones

  2. Pieter Hartsook Says:

    Ray,

    OSAF is a founding member of calconnect.org, the calendaring and scheduling consortium. We are in fact hosting the September roundtable and interop at our offices in SF. Check out their website for other interop events.

  3. Brian Moseley Says:

    What Pieter said :)

    Also, I’m curious what you mean by “WebDav-like interface” and how your sync feature works. Could you explain further, or point me to some documentation?

    Thanks!

  4. rjones Says:

    Brian,
    I’m no WebDav expert, so please excuse if I gloss over something important :)

    WebCalendar v1.1, enables users (I’ve tested Sunbird, Apple Ical, and WinDates) to synchronize their clients with their WebCalendar account. We do it on the fly instead of storing the ics files in a WebDav environment. It’s totally transparent to the user and works quite well. I’ve never used a WevDAV server so I can’t honestly compare them.

    We haven’t got all the formal documentation done yet, but the files are fairly well documented. You can check them out on the source code at
    http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/webcalendar/webcalendar/icalclient.php?rev=1.6&view=markup

    I have a testbed set up at http://131.118.223.21/cvs_checkout/icalclient.php
    username is admin
    password is admin

    Feel free to play around with it…you can also log into the corresponding WebCalendar account at http://131.118.223.21/cvs_checkout/
    same account info

    I’m in the process of a total RFC2445 compatability rewrite, so some things will change. I hope for the better :)

    -Ray

  5. rjones Says:

    Oops, the lnks are wrong in demo site above.

    131.118.223.21/cvs_checkout/icalclient.php
    username is admin
    password is admin

    accessed from a calendar client should do the trick.

    Ray

  6. Brian Moseley Says:

    ah, gotcha. very cool to see this feature in WebCalendar.

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