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Seeking a Client Independent Calendar Server?
Prep asks: "I work in the IT shop at a small liberal arts school, which has, for a few years now, offered a calendar solution that lets members of the community keep a personal calendar/task list, as well as view/schedule publicly viewable meetings and tasks for other members of the community, as well as campus resources (rooms, projectors, vehicles, etc). The system works pretty well right now, but it's entirely proprietary. What I'm wondering is why the client independent model used by mail servers hasn't been adopted by a calendaring project. With standards like iCal and vCal floating around, it seems to me that the groundwork has been laid for a backend server which could interact with popular clients like Ximian's Evolution, Mozilla's Calendar, Apple's iCal, and even Microsoft's Outlook, giving users the ability to use whatever platform/client they wish, while still maintaining the ability to interact with their co-workers. If the software were tied to an SQL backend, then you could even offer a web enabled front end, perhaps even with a tie in to projects like IMP. Does anyone know of any projects working toward an open standards based end like this?"
I'm personally not clear if Reefknot is meant to be a self-contained iCalendar server, or if it's meant to provide the libraries that can be embedded in an Apache/mod_perl server (the latter makes a bit more sense to me -- that way you can get WebDAV support from mod_dav, Apache's built in authentication mechanisms, etc -- but I'm not sure if that's accurate). In any case though, it gives you some substantial building blocks to start with & use as you see fit. Obviously a more cohesive package would be a nice thing, but that's why the project needs to get moving again :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
The standards exist, but no one has written the server.
You can't really blame them since the Calendar Access Protocol (CAP) which is going to be the IMAP+SMTP of Calendaring, providing synchronous calendaring to clients is on it's 10th draft. Read this email if you have lost hope that the IETF would have calendaring anytime soon. Appearently draft 11 is coming soon and it will be the last one. So it looks like CAP will be finalized RSN. (Thank God, this thing was becoming like Duke Nukem Forever)
You could poke a stick at the OpenCap Server project and see if you get a response. But I haven't heard anything in months.
I don't know what's up with the Libical guys. The mail archive has been dead since December 16. Of course some of them are working on Free Association which is supposed to be a server and client. Since the mailing lists for libical seem dead I couldn't tell you what the status of CAP support currently is. My understanding was that they had been keeping up with the drafts, but since the 10th one was released about a month ago, I have no idea what the current status is.
Mozilla should be getting Calendaring in 1.4. IIRC, the calendaring uses libical. The College of Charleston computing dept has taken on enhancing the client (Go Cougars!). Hopefully they'll be putting CAP support in.
If anyone wants to know what it would take to write a calendar server and put an end to the Notes/Exchange duopoly in groupware, visit the Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group of the IETF. These are the guys that have brought you iCAL (RFC2445), iTIP (RFC2446), iMip (RFC2447), iCal Locating and LDAP (RFC2739) and the Guide to Internet Calendaring (RFC3283).
Read the iCalendar Guide then all the other documents at the site. Next go write the server. Then make sure Mozilla's Calendar client works with it, and email me so I can go replace exchange servers with it.
If you find a solution that does not use CAP, beat the authors with a ClueStick till they give in and write something that uses IETF protocols so we can interop with it.
Personally I'd really like to see the Cyrus IMAP server get a CAP piece put in. Combined with OpenLDAP and Mozilla as the client, it would be a Notes/Exchange killer.
While I'm sitting here making demands from the Open Source messaging community, why the hell doesn't Mozilla get SIEVE (RFC3028) support so we can have a standard for server-side email filtering rules, Cyrus supports it in the IMAP server. Oh, and I also want write support for LDAP address books in Mozilla.
To answer the original question, I think it's coming, slowly, but coming. Lord knows, I've only been waiting for 4 years or so.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
If the software were tied to an SQL backend, then you could even offer a web enabled front end, perhaps even with a tie in to projects like IMP.
The Horde Framework (of which IMP is a sub-project) has it's own web-enabled calendar. The project is called Kronolith, and it's moving towards what you need.
While not all of its features are complete, it looks to include support for shared calendars, the iCal standard, and ICAP support through MCAL (other posts have addressed ICAP and it's not-quite-settled status). Thus, when the dust has settled, it should interoperate with other calendars. In the meantime, it's web-based right now, so that might provide what you need before all the formats are finished.
Disclaimer: I am friends with members of the Horde dev team.