[chandler-users] Sharing calendar on Google, read-write, AKA CalDAV

[Jeffrey Harris]

Hi Folks,

If you keep your calendar on Google, you may or may not know that you
now can share your calendar read-write with desktop calendar clients
using the CalDAV protocol.

OSAF has been a big supporter of CalDAV's development (Lisa Dusseault,
one of the authers of CalDAV, was on OSAF's staff for many years).

Chandler Server is itself a CalDAV server, so if you use Mozilla's
Lightning or Apple's iCal, you can share Chandler Server calendars
read-write already.

But if your calendar is on Google, until now its been challenging to do
read-write sharing.  Now, you can, sort of.

Google's been working hard on fixing bugs in their CalDAV
implementation, but it's still fairly picky.  In the early days, you
often couldn't create new events from iCal, but you could edit existing
events.  That seems to be fixed, hooray!

Chandler's support for CalDAV hasn't gotten a lot of love in recent
years (we moved away from CalDAV for sharing Chandler data for
performance reasons), and unfortunately the main Chandler build has
crept away from having good CalDAV support.

I did some work when Google's CalDAV support first came out to get
Chandler working well with CalDAV again.  To use Chandler with CalDAV,
you can download a special build from:

http://builds.osafoundation.org/chandler/snapshots/caldav-1.0/

and test it out.

To get started, you'll need to subscribe to a special URL.  It'll look
something like:

https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/jeffrey@gmail.com/events/

but replace jeffrey at gmail.com with your google email address.  Note that
the trailing slash is *essential*, I'm not sure why but I think it's a
Chandler bug.

CalDAV seems to be working fairly well, but we'd like users to help us
out with testing.  One known issue is that occasionally, if you make
several changes to a recurring event, Google will start rejecting
changes.  That'll mean the whole calendar won't sync anymore.  I'm not
sure how common this is, if you run into it please add a comment to

https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12377

Hope it works well for you!

Sincerely,
Jeffrey