Re: relationship to iCalendar

On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Libby Miller wrote:

> sorry for the delay in replying - I've been at a conference.

Not a problem. I am a coop currently and I been running around like a
chicken with my head cut off trying to wrap up to head back to school. =)

> you want to use jetspeed but with xml to do calendaring (although not
> interactive scheduling)

Well, nothing interactive to start out with. Honestly I am trying to
figure out if I am getting ready to bite off more than I can chew. I have
a descent amount of experience in java and html. I am getting pretty good
with xml and xslt as well. I like all of them as technologies and in
trying to come up with a plan for the project I tried to find ways to use
them while hopefully leveraging the work of other people as much as
possible.

Other than a little bit of time spent playing configuring tomcat I have
little experience developing servlets. All of the dynamic HTML generation
I have done thus far has been perl or php. For those projects though most
of the complexity was in the database and the programming was mainly just
parsing inputs and formatting results from queries. I expect this project
to be more complex programatically and I in the long term it will be more
maintainable in java.

> Our technique is to implement demos at least as we are working on the
> draft, so that we get some idea of whether the approach we are taking is
> suitable for our purposes.

Are these demos public sorts of things? I would be curious to look at
them; are they collected somewhere?

> From our point of view if you did an implementation using RDF, that
> would be great (although your input might mean that the schema changed).

I was unfamiliar with RDF before searching on Google for iCalendar XML and
discovering this project. I supposed I knew about it a little having
worked on a RSS, but the extent of the project was beyond me.
Interestingly enough though I worked on intelligent agents (for
manufacturing work rather than web searching, but in the ball park) and
the professor I was working with needs a language to do the sorts of
things that RDF does to do some interagent communication. So, this is
useful all around. =)

> > 3. How closely does this specification model the iCalendar structure?
>
> currently, very closely, although as we get more implementation
> experience, this may change.

I was asking mainly because I was wondering if doing something like a
proxy would be reasonable where a third program could xmlize and dexmlize
an input stream coming from a client using the original protocol. I'll
worry about stuff like that more when I have something to be proxing to. =)

> I'd be interested to know what you decide to do.

Right now, lots of reading. I want to get up to speed on RDF, iCalendar
and Jetspeed and figure out if they will work together well. Being able to
communicate easily with others is something I would like to see more of in
the world and I think it is going to take the propagation of some protocol
to let that happen. As much as anything I am interested in doing this in a
standards based way so as to perhaps strengthen the position of iCalendar
in the market. I have been able to find very few references to actual
implemented servers and those need to be around and available for the
protocol to succeed.

Will Holcomb

Received on Thursday, 9 August 2001 23:29:20 UTC