Well, we’ve spent the last two days going over lots of details about calendaring interoperability – Yesterday was mostly about hammering through a long list of use-cases. While I haven’t typically been a big fan of use-cases for designing software, they are critical for being able to define success in interoperability between disparate pieces of software. If we do this right, and the interoperability tests eventually meet the use-cases, then we will know we have success.
Eight of us had a great Thai dinner last night and talked about trying to get to a point where we actually have a set of roadmaps that define the work we’re doing in the CalConnect group – and in a moment of weakness I volunteered to coordinate that effort. If anybody has good examples of technology roadmaps they want to pass along, I’d appreciate it.
Today we spent most of the morning in talking about domain models, without, I think, achieving complete clarity, but seeing more of the issues.
This afternoon has been spent catching up on the work on the CalDAV standard – lots of great work going on in further defining the standard, and it looks like there will be a final call on the draft sometime soon.
Then we talked about authentication models for CalDAV – there’s lots of problems with web authentication, and WebDAV has inherited those problems, and therefore CalDAV inherits those problems.
Then we discussed time zones. Hoo-boy – can you believe that there is no authoritative listing of time zones? The best available is the so-called Olson database, which is something put together as a hobby by someone named Olson who works at NIH. Sheesh. And who knew that there are some time zones that vary from others by 15 minutes? Yikes.
The interop wrapped up – no detailed results shared yet, but everybody felt that it went really well. We had six different implementations of CalDAV attempting interoperation with each other – fabulous!
Oren Sreebny 