relationship to iCalendar

I have several projects for which I am interested in having calendaring
and I have been looking at iCalendar as a possiblity for the protocol.
Though the nature of the projects could allow me to use calendars that
aren't interoperable if I am going to be putting the time in on it I would
like to produce as high a quality product as possible.

Right now I am in the planning stages, trying to figure out what path is
the best one to get me where I want to go. I am interested in iCalendar
because it is a public standard and it looked to be a standard that
attempted to encompass a variety of issues.

The language that I enjoy the most for large projects is java and I have
been working with xslt for a bit and I have really enjoyed it. I am using
several of the projects from the apache group's xml work
(http://xml.apache.org) and also from the apache jakarta project
(http://jakarta.apache.org) Jetspeed is a part of the jakarta project;
"Jetspeed is an Open Source implementation of an Enterprise Information
Portal, using Java and XML." They have a partial iCalendar implementation
that is now abandoned (as best I can tell, I e-mailed the maintainer and
the list about two weeks ago and noone knows where the maintainer is.)

So, working on the Jetspeed iCalendar implementation seemed to be that way
to go. Something that I don't like though about iCalendar is the non-xml
protocol. After working with xslt, I am in love with xml. =) My project
right now is taking documents that are a subset of docbook and spitting
them out in half a dozen different forms for different types of
distribution. Having the computer take care of that drudgery is great. I
was hunting to see if anyone else had come up with the obvious idea of an
xml based protocol and came across a dtd somewhere and then across this
work today.

I am working on this for where I go to school and I have two primary
useage scenarios:

1. As a part of a portfolio system that keeps track of different meetings
attended, presentations given, papers, etc. This will be largely
historical and will not involve much interaction between different parties
though I do want to define classes for different events (presentations
given for certain classes, conferences attended through different
organizations) and allow filtering based on those properties (being able
to see only the events attended in conjunction with the Honors Program.)

2. As the primary calendar for the campus (and possibly for the student
body if so desired.) Many campus events suffer for lack of publicity and
many students miss events that would interest them. I want to make it
possible for designated members of different campus organizations to post
their events and mark the importance of those events. Also I want to be
able to limit the visible events both by the creator (members only
meetings) and the viewer (filter events based on organizational
associations) or for events to be completely public.

I am trying to formulate meaningful questions to help me decide if the
development path that I am contemplating is feasible and the best usage of
my time. Given my lack of experience with RDF (I looked at the RSS spec
one time to help a buddy figure out what was wrong with the one he was
generating) and with iCalendar (I have skimmed RFC2445) my questions are:

1. How close is this group to a stable draft of a RDF calendar
    specification?
2. What is the authoritative place to look for the current draft version
    if such a thing exists?
3. How closely does this specification model the iCalendar structure?
4. What sort of a time frame would you estimate for the development of a
    robust implementation from the ground up in java done by a single
    person? (This is likely not my situation on every point, but it is a
    good reference I think.)
5. Is it feasible for a single person to undertake an implementation in a
    reasonable amount of time (4 months?)
6. What references would you recommend for becoming more familiar with the
    concepts necessary to work on an implementation?

Any information you have would be greatly appreciated.

Will Holcomb

Received on Monday, 30 July 2001 21:06:09 UTC