[Ietf-caldav] CalDAV comments, a bit too late...

[Cyrus Daboo]

Hi Shug,

--On September 24, 2008 4:00:54 PM +0300 Shug Boabby 
<shug.boabby at gmail.com> wrote:

> I realise that CalDAV is now supported by many big vendors, including
> Google and Apple, so I doubt that the protocol could be changed in any
> way. Nonetheless, being called RFC-4791 implies that comments are
> still welcome (and I have some steam to let off after using this
> ghastly protocol which it seems we are all stuck with!)

The reality is CalDAV came along because previous attempts to create a 
"clean and simple" calendaring and scheduling protocol in the IETF came to 
naught because they invariably ended up getting too complex - and the 
reason for that is that calendaring and scheduling itself is complex. 
CalDAV worked because it was based on existing, well understood protocols 
that had a much lower barrier to entry because there were already lots of 
tools and libraries for HTTP, WebDAV and iCalendar. Within about four 
months of the inaugural Calendaring & Scheduling meeting in September 2004 
there were several servers and clients showing basic interoperability for 
calendar access.

That said CalDAV is a basis for a calendaring solution and not the final 
solution. There is plenty of scope for extensions to do things like 
aggregation of queries, or synchronization reports for more efficient 
bandwidth usage. Indeed many of these have been discussed by those people 
actually implementing and deploying CalDAV since those are the folks who 
really get to see the limitations in practice. Other extensions such as 
Atom/RSS feeds on calendar collections and the like have also been 
discussed.

It is also pretty easy to write a caching proxy gateway that would allow 
you to use a "clean and simple" protocol on the J2ME side to talk to one or 
more CalDAV servers.

> I recently embarked on creating a J2ME application which would use a
> CalDAV server to store everything. The reason is obvious, as it means
> that resources are easily synchronised with all good desktop calendar
> applications.

Well I wrote a prototype CalDAV J2ME client almost four years ago. Yes it 
used raw sockets and I adapted my own WebDAV and iCalendar libraries from a 
desktop product (i.e. did not have to start from scratch), and it had 
virtually no UI - just a simple list of events for today or over the next 
week. But that was sufficient for what I needed and it performed adequately.

It is worth noting that calendaring vendors are concerned about mobile 
devices. In fact the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium is hosting its 
second mobile calendaring interoperability test event in the Czech Republic 
in November (<http://www.calconnect.org/miop0811.shtml>). I believe one of 
the areas that the mobile technical committee in the Consortium wants to 
turn its attention to is how CalDAV can better work with mobile devices, so 
I am sure they will be proposing extensions etc to help with that. I would 
certainly urge anyone who is interested in this area to find a way to get 
involved in that effort, or to continue discussion of this topic on this 
list.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo