Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: August 2006

  • Oh the CalDAV Possibilities

    While checking up on the Darwin Calendar Server wiki the other day I noticed something I had missed last week: CalDAVTester. It is an exhaustive suite of tests written in Python with XML config files to verify that a CalDAV server implementation is properly implementing the spec.  This suite of tests is going to prove very useful as more servers and clients implement the CalDAV spec.

    Right now the biggest problem with CalDAV is a lack of clients and servers.  That will change over the next 6-8 months as clients and servers are refined, released and rolled out.  Hopefully the CalConnect group and an exhaustive suite of tests will help keep interop a high priority.

  • Darwin Calendar Server

    As soon as Gruber pointed out Darwin Calendar Server I felt like I had to check it out. I’ve played with Darwin Streaming Server in the past and love me some Webkit. I was pleasantly suprised to find that Darwin Calendar Server runs on top of Python and Twisted.

    So away I went. I checked out the source and began to poke around. I managed to check out the source before the README was added so I did a fair amount of head scratching and wheel spinning, but it turns out that getting up and running is pretty easy: ./run -s

    That sets up the server, downloading and building some prereqs as it goes. I already had some prereqs installed system wide so I can’t guarantee that this works, but I’m pretty sure that it has worked for others. I should take a second to qualify that I’m running OS X 10.4 with Python 2.4 installed. From there I copied over the sample config file (cp ./conf/repository-static.xml ./conf/repository-dev.xml) and immediately started troubleshooting SSL errors. First I installed PyOpenSSL and created a self-signed certificate. That yielded a brand new error: OpenSSL.SSL.Error: [('PEM routines', 'PEM_read_bio', 'no start line'), ('SSL routines', 'SSL_CTX_use_PrivateKey_file', 'PEM lib')]

    After doing that and getting some guidance from the folks in #collaboration on freenode I decided to hack away at the plist and disable SSL for now (change SSLEnable to false instead of true). From there I could run the server (./run) and bring up a directory listing my pointing to 127.0.0.1:8008.

    Darwin Calendar Server Chandler Setup

    From there I subscribed to the example payday calendar and the holiday calendar. It appears that iCal won’t do two-way CalDAV until Leopard, but in the meantime I was able to successfully set up and test Chandler.

    This is some absolutely amazing tech in its infancy. I can’t wait to see where this goes and I’m excited that it’s built with tools that I’m familiar with (Python, Twisted, SQLite, iCal). It seems to me like this open source app is but the tip of the iceberg of collaboration features that will be baked in to OS X 10.5 desktop and server.  I would also kill for a mobile device that spoke CalDAV natively so that I can replace my duct taped google calendar to iCal to iSync to 6682 workflow.