DAViCal CalDAV & CardDAV Server

Well, it seems that there were few problems with the pre-release of DAViCal I pushed out last week, so 0.9.6 is out now. The full release notes are on the wiki. The biggest change is that this release now supports free/busy using the method defined ... [More] in the draft scheduling extensions for CalDAV, so it's possible to schedule meetings with Sunbird/Lightning or iCal, and possibly other clients if they support that. Now I can concentrate on getting some paid work done for a few weeks before I start on the next stage. Updated After release I discovered that due to the changed behaviour of DAViCal, interoperation with Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning 0.8 was no longer working. A new 0.9.6.1 version has been released to resolve this issue. [Less]

Here are some pre-release DAViCal 0.9.5.90 (i.e. nearly 0.9.6) packages now. Since there is a lot of refactoring that has gone on under the covers here, I'll publish these packages so that people can tell me about all my embarassing mistakes, and I ... [More] can correct them, before I upload them to places where they might get installed more or less automatically. In particular if you do find problems with these, and can catch me on the #davical on irc.oftc.net during the coming week I should be able to include a fix into the real 0.9.6 release next week. If you can't get on IRC then an e-mail will also be fine. The full release notes are here but the short version is that this fixes a number of bugs, notably one to do with importing calendars containing repeating events with exceptions. The big change is that this adds the initial support for the draft scheduling extensions to CalDAV, in particular the lookup of free/busy information. Updated In true pre-release fashion I forgot to actually enable the scheduling extensions stuff, so I've put new packages (0.9.5.91) on there now with that enabled... :-) [Less]

Writing free, open-source software is an incredibly public activity. Everything you do is in the public eye, and google will inevitably discover your site, and then other people will find your software, and download it, and this is a good thing. ... [More] It's why you're doing it, after all, and it's so nice to receive those occasional 'Thank you for your software' e-mails. There are occasional exceptions, however. Today's practical exercise is to demonstrate your skills responding to the annual student exercise question, like this one, following on to finish a real exchange while still retaining your sanity to the maximum extent possible. Humour will receive bonus points. Here goes. First up, we have an e-mail arriving out of the blue which looks like this: how to run the caldav server in window i have download it from the http://wiki.davical.org/ <!--break--> I understand that, for this person, English is not their first language, or perhaps this is an attempt at haiku? In either case, I think that they could try a little harder... and they're trying to do it on Microsoft Windows, too, which has been erased from all of the laptops I ever had it installed on (and it never came with any of my servers in the first place). I can't really help, except to point them at the wiki. And it would be natural to believe they might already know about that, I mean: given the URL they provided, and everything... I haul out all of my very best punctuation to reply with: Hi, I know that people have run DAViCal on Windows, but I wouldn't have a clue what version, or what they did. I'm sorry, but I have not used Windows for many years and unless someone pays me ludicrous amounts of money I can't see it happening any time soon. I don't own a copy, and of the 12 computers in my house none of them run Windows. Why would they? Here http://wiki.davical.org/w/Windows_With_Apache is some information that may be of assistance. There is also some code in the tree for creating the database on a PostgreSQL on Windows environment, but it probably needs some updating. You could try asking (perhaps a bit more politely) on the mailing list, and someone who still remembers Windows might be able to help. Good luck, Andrew McMillan. You would think that someone might get the point, here. I mean I haven't been exactly subtle about the 'some politeness would be nice', explicitly mentioning it in the last paragraph and all. Anyway, they continue right back at me with: actually i want to develop an icalender and client should interact with server through caldav protocol but i am geeting the exact methodoly for the project please mail me the methodology and sudo code of client which will interract with the server Ah, OK. Now I get it. He's trying to get me to do his computer science project for him! Of course he's not telling me that, so I can't be completely sure - I mean people in third-world countries like Nepal (ever curious, I'd run whois on his from domain & sender IP by now) just might get given jobs like this. So I quickly reply back that beyond 'sudo' code, there is real code... and no, I won't do their assignment for them, so I cheerfully omit any mention of that: There is PHP code for a client in the DAViCal source code, which you could use as a template. Look for inc/caldav-client.php for clues. It uses some libraries from my other AWL php libraries for constructing iCalendar and handling RRULE and so forth. Cheers, Andrew. But lo (and this is the entire content of his e-mail): please mail me icalender.php file and brief methodology of the project Along with their abruptness and lack of punctuation, the sheer laziness of this person is really starting to piss me off. I'd hinted earlier (strongly, I thought) that a sprinkling of politeness might garner better cooperation, but this person has clearly linked /dev/input/hints to /dev/null. Well, that's what /dev/input/cluestick is for, so here goes: Why don't you just download it? Install the Debian package? Pull it from the source code repository? Why do you want me to "provide a brief methodology of the project"? Are you intending to pay me to do that? Who the hell are you? Your abrupt and unpunctuated communication might be the result of you not being a native speaker of english, but I strongly encourage you to work on overcoming your apparent rudeness if you want my cooperation. Cheers, Andrew. Of course I'm starting to enjoy myself now (sallying forth with the cluestick always gets the adrenalin flowing :-) so I manage stay up long enough to finally receive the first e-mail that contains a little honesty, if still sadly lacking in the politeness and punctuation departments... The subject line^Wword of all of the earlier e-mails was 'help' but I must have scored a hit with that cluestick because this time it's 'sorry'. sir i am final year student of computer engineering in 'XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX xxxxxxx campus Nepal I am doing this project as my final year project and i have been studying caldav protocols,webdav,php calender and others since last 10 days but i am not sure about the exact methodlogy so i request u to tell brief idea after installing ur sever i can't find icalender.php file so i told u to mail me that file ur regards xxxxxxxx So my question, dear readers, is "What Would You Do?" at this point? It won't affect my own response, which I spent some time drafting (well, 23 minutes, to be precise), and toward the end of which I could be heard giggling maniacally. Was I too harsh? I'm sure some people who pop in here from time to time are not native English speakers and might have some interesting comment on whether or not I am making enough allowances for that. I do know that the first word of Spanish that I learned was 'hola', and the second was 'gracias', closely followed by 'por favor' (strangely, this was then chased by '¿Dónde está el baños?', but that's how stuff happens I guess). For German I'm pretty sure it was 'guten tag' and then a race between 'danke' and 'bitte'. I won't show you what I wrote, so please be as creative as possible in any suggestions you care to leave as comments below. I can, however, leave you with their final reply, where apparently all is forgiven. This was sent only 5 hours after the first message. your are really great and sorry for my words your regards xxxxxxxx I'll share the communique from me that eleicited that final squeak in a month's time, or maybe sooner, if I can get five good alternatives in the comments section. 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Finally, I have released DAViCal 0.9.5. Hopefully this will resolve the series of installation- and upgrade- related problems which plagued the 0.9.4 release. Thanks for everyone being patient while this release was thoroughly tested through five ... [More] pre-release versions, and especially thanks to those patient people who helped test those pre-releases. Now if I don't get too distracted by: processing my GPS tracks of the last two weeks around the South Island Uploading my last six months worth of photos Making sure the kids have done their homework Describing the places near where I live. ...anything else that catches my interest ... then maybe I will be able to really concentrate on nailing the scheduling extensions work over the next couple of months... Wish me luck! [Less]

Quite a few people seem impressed with the new release of Leopard, and are now looking for a CalDAV server to use with their shiny new iCal app. Unfortunately it seems that Apple wrote this primarily to work with their own (free, open-source) ... [More] calendar server, which has the side effect that it doesn't work with DAViCal. Part of the "doesn't work" is due to DAViCal not implementing some areas of the CalDAV specification, which is fair enough. Part of it is due to DAViCal not implementing some draft extensions to the CalDAV specification, which I can also understand, since it allows them to provide some useful features that those extensions are designed to support. There also seem to be some parts of the "doesn't work" which are due to a dependence on extensions beyond either of these cases, which is a little more disappointing - and quite a bit harder to implement. So far I have made some fixes to the first point, and some additions towards parts of the second, but as of today it still does not work. This is complicated by my not having access to a Mac. Things are looking up, however, because Tom Robinson has kindly agreed to loan me a Mac running Leopard from next week. In order to "clear the slate" for that, I will be releasing a 0.9.2 over the weekend with the various minor enhancements and fixes that have been applied over the last week. So although this upcoming release will let you add your DAViCal account to iCal 3, it still won't actually work with it. I'm hoping that ready access to the application will enable me to correct that fairly quickly. Also waiting in the wings (and which unfortunately won't be in 0.9.2 either) Maxime Delorme has been working on SyncML support, and is nearly ready with a patch, so we can look forward to that addition fairly soon also. [Less]

I have not been able to put a lot of effort into DAViCal over the last couple of months, since my father was diagnosed with stomach cancer in early September, and he died on 2nd October. So here it is, finally, including a lot of refactoring work ... [More] around the handling of DAV/CalDAV REPORT requests and implementation of the DAV::principal-property-search report. This also requires an upgrade to the latest AWL library (0.20), which includes a complete rewrite to the class used for parsing and rendering iCalendar data. This release is recommended, since you will need some of this stuff to support the upcoming Mozilla Calendar 0.7 release properly. At this point I have only released the files to http://debian.mcmillan.net.nz/ and I'll push it out to a wider audience if I don't here screams of anguish from people in the next few days :-) This release does not have any associated database changes, so it should be a simple matter to install the upgraded code. [Less]

After much wading through possible names, none of which really excited me, I have finally chosen "DAViCal" as the new name for my CalDAV server that was previously called RSCDS, or the "Really Simple CalDAV Store". In the end, I chose DAViCal because ... [More] it: seems easy to pronounce. combines the 'Cal' and 'DAV'. returns < 1000 results on google. doesn't make me cringe. didn't have a domain name registered. That was about the hardest part of preparing for the 0.8.1 release, and now that I've done that I should manage to make the changes to the packaging, though I have no doubt that the old name will appear in all sorts of places for a while yet. Choosing names is an important business, and I should know that from the length of time we spent agonising over names for our children, discarding all sorts of things because they had silly abbreviation collisions (like the "Royal Scottish Country Dance Society" :-) Even then, I think we got the kids names wrong, and the big one should be called "Thumper" with the little one called "Sly", but perhaps that's just a temporary annoyance and in time the names that we registered for them will fit them better. I also recall Grant once saying that you should never use the word "Simple" in the name of your project, and he should know. DAViCal is no longer particularly simple, although I have attempted to hide the complexity from the user as far as that is possible, and will continue to do so. Once I get out version 0.8.1 of DAViCal I will finally upload it to Debian, proper. This version has some important enhancements to its DAV spec compliance which are going to be needed by some future versions of Mozilla, and probably other things too, so it's important to push it out as soon as possible now. [Less]