I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal
A key aspect of any groupware solution is the ability to share calendars. Leopard server brings the long-awaited ability to share calendars to the Mac OS X Server platform. Leopard uses CalDAV as the back end protocol for Calendar sharing. CalDAV is currently supported by Facebook, Novell Evolution, Zimbra, Drupal, Microsoft Exchange, Kerio and now Mac OS X Server.
CalDAV looks at each event as an HTTP resource, giving users the ability to view events in a web browser. Each event is stored in the iCalendar format.
A typical event in the iCalendar format:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Apple Calendar//Calendar1//Charles Edge
BEGIN:VTODO
DTSTAMP:19980130T134500Z
SEQUENCE:2
UID:uid4@host1.com
ORGANIZER:MAILTO:riaa@us.gov
ATTENDEE;PARTSTAT=ACCEPTED:MAILTO:riaa@host.com
DUE:19980415T235959
STATUS:NEEDS-ACTION
SUMMARY:Random Music File
BEGIN:VALARM
ACTION:AUDIO
TRIGGER:19980403T120000
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=audio/basic:http://myhost.com/publish/audio-
files/file.mp3
REPEAT:3
DURATION:PT1H
END:VALARM
END:VTODO
END:VCALENDAR
Parsing this data can help you to imbed data from Leopard Server into your 3rd party web services. One difference between CalDAV events in Mac OS X Server and other types of event handlers is how they are presented over the wire. For example, Kerio, a popular Mac-based groupware solution presents CalDAV in the form of an ICS file so it can be viewed through iCal in pre-Leopard computers.
