Re: [Evolution-hackers] calendar implementation (Partly OT)

[Ronald Kuetemeier <ronald kuetemeier com>]

On Thu, 2003-04-10 at 08:32, Adam Williams wrote:
> >I read that page, and it is more then a year old. So I was hoping some
> >more had happened. It hasn't
> >If you 'just point it to a published file' your info is always out of
> >date. The freebusy url I mentioned in my previous posting is already out
> >of date.
> 
> The freebusy information can be generated by a PHP script, etc... if the 
> calendar is stored in a database, etc...  The Horde package Kronolith can 
> display freebusy from their calendering applicaiton.
> 
That best way to generate the free_busy is to get the change
notifications from evolution. Take a look at
calendar/cal-client/client-test.c. I used this program to write a daemon
which publishes free_busy whenever my calendar changes. These changes
are put via webdav onto a web server, where other evolution or outlook
users can get them for scheduling info.
If you want to have a public calendar you can use webdav also to push
your calendar.ics file onto the web server and use phpicalendar to
render it.
For small setups this should give you most of the functionality you need
not to use exchange, i.e free_busy for scheduling and a calendar people
can look at. I don't use phpicalendar, but have read that it also
published private info, so be careful.
If you need scheduling for resources, conference rooms ..., it gets
tricky. I'm looking into setting up an auto responder, which manages a
*.ics file per room publishes free_busy for scheduling and uses
phpicalendar for detailed info. The scheduling protocol is just simple
email from evolution for calendar request, like you use now with
evolution for setting up meetings.

You might want to look at:
http://www.washington.edu/ucal/ (good candidate still a web calendar
server, soup to connect?) 
http://www.opencap.org/html/ (stalled because of freq. cap changes)
http://www.horde.org/ (another web calendar, but a little more)
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-calsch-cap-10.txt
http://www.kroupware.org/index.html (uses imap to store calendar info,
webdav for free_busy as usual).

In general the outlook for an open source calendar server is not very
promising without a corporate sponsor right now, even small to medium
size companies need it to avoid exchange and to convert to Linux. 

Hope this helps,
Ronald


> >I would really like to work on an open source project geared towards an
> >standards based calendar server. But after reading a lot of info I would
> >not even know where to begin protocolwise? BEEP looks nice, but very
> >theoretically. HTTP might be much easier to use but it seems the IETF
> >people do not want that.
> 
> The Horde project applications (the CVS/HEAD versions anyway) express 
> there functionality via XML-RPC.  There is already a palm sync conduit for 
> Win32 desktops under developement.  If someone wrote a pcs module for 
> evolution that used their XML-RPC api...  The libraries evo "contains" 
> already know how to do things like SOAP, XML-RPC, and the like.
> 
> 
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