Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

[Posted December 23, 2011 by corbet]

Keith Packard announces the launch of a new calendar server project. "I started hacking at Radicale to see how far I could get. I changed the storage code to store one event per file, then added hooks to use git for change management. Then, I found a full vcalendar/vcard parsing library in python, vobject, which I used to replace the ad-hoc parsing code. Finally, I added support for VCARD entries as well, allowing the system to store both calendar and contact information."

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 23, 2011 15:43 UTC (Fri) by suy (guest, #81959) [Link] (8 responses)

I guess other clients will be supported besides Evolution, because Radicale, the project it was derived from, claims to support Lightning and KOrganizer (and others) as well.

This is really good news to me, as I was already using one file per contact or calendar entry with KAddressBook and KOrganizer. It was very convenient for using rsync to mirror laptop and desktop. A git storage is even better, since I was very paranoid when deleting old entries, and rotating backups wasn't ideal.

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 23, 2011 17:28 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (5 responses)

Yes. This is cool.

I think that everybody should have a webdav server at home. It's getting more useful as time goes on. It's also a nice way to securely share files over the internet without needing to share SSH access or use a hosted service.

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 23, 2011 18:24 UTC (Fri) by armijn (subscriber, #3653) [Link] (1 responses)

Personally, I think it is a bit sad that this standard (from 1996) has not been adapted more because it is quite flexible and you can do a lot more than just file storage (just take a look at all the crap^Wstuff in a WebDAV request sent by OpenOffice.org).

Client support for standard file storage (that is, the out of the box functionality that mod_dav offers server side) in many of the desktop environments and applications is unfortunately quite buggy (and yes, I and other people did file bug reports with clear test cases and sometimes patches, and they were silently ignored). Non-ASCII characters in file names has been an issue for years in GNOME 2 (I have not tried with GNOME 3 yet).

I hope that initiatives like this and OwnCloud (which also uses a lot of WebDAV) will lead to an improvement in that area. I guess it's time to dust off my debugging and testing skills :-)

ISO-8859-1 vs UTF-8

Posted Dec 23, 2011 18:40 UTC (Fri) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]

Encoding problems with Non-ASCII characters in pathname and query components of http URIs are quite problematic for interoperability reasons: Some HTTP servers expect ISO-8859-1 and other UTF-8. I had to add a special case to Opera just a few minutes ago because the stock Apache HTTP Server decodes requests as ISO-8859-1. I consider myself lucky to use only Latin-1 characters.

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 26, 2011 18:45 UTC (Mon) by hollis (subscriber, #6768) [Link] (2 responses)

OK, what can I do with webdav? I suppose it depends on having clients that can access it... are you saying those are now ubiquitous?

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 27, 2011 17:54 UTC (Tue) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link]

Client support is pretty much universal. You can mount a WebDAV volume in Windows since XP, it works pretty well via GVFS/Nautilus. Evolution works with CalDAV calendars and WebDAV addressbooks.

There is the GroupDAV spec which adds a bit of logic on top of WebDAV for things like Contact collections; it never got a great deal of press but the concept works well and it is pretty simple to implement.

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 28, 2011 13:37 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> OK, what can I do with webdav?

Access your files securely and reliably on virtually any network, regardless of firewalls (https access is very rarely blocked), with the vast majority of operating systems.

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 24, 2011 18:47 UTC (Sat) by SysNux (subscriber, #27606) [Link] (1 responses)

I have tried Calypso with Lightning. I found a problem with deleting events, and had to change line 248 in calypso/__inti__.py to:
if item and environ.get("HTTP_IF_MATCH", item.etag) == item.etag:
(this is what they have in newer versions of Radicale)
Now it seems to work fine in my limited testing.

I also exported my existing Lightning calendar to file and tried "calypso --import" to get it in caldav: I found it only works with single events, so I had to split the exported file first.

Calypso seems to be based on version 0.5 of Radicale, which is now at 0.6.3, and they seem to be discussing different storage backend; I think it would be great to merge back.

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 24, 2011 19:56 UTC (Sat) by keithp (subscriber, #5140) [Link]

Of course I sent changes to the Radicale developers when I started hacking on it, and merging my stuff back in would probably be the best plan. I wanted to make my stuff available, and as it's very different from the current Radicale, I didn't want to confuse things, so I chose a different name (at least for now).

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 23, 2011 23:36 UTC (Fri) by The_Barbarian (guest, #48152) [Link] (3 responses)

I just saw this on one of my planet feeds. Looks perfect to go with my ejabberd and dovecote/postfix. I didn't really want to run PHP or Java just for CalDAV

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 24, 2011 1:19 UTC (Sat) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link] (2 responses)

Have you considered SOGo? It's Objective C and comes with a decent webui as well.

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 25, 2011 18:29 UTC (Sun) by The_Barbarian (guest, #48152) [Link]

There are a number of groupware projects I like the look of, but I don't really want to run a unified groupware server right now. I am more interested in learning individual major components

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 27, 2011 17:56 UTC (Tue) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link]

I've also been reimplementing the original OpenGroupware project in Python - see OpenGroupware Coils. Things are coming along nicely and I've built in some very powerful workflow and ETL tools.

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 25, 2011 23:34 UTC (Sun) by hazmat (subscriber, #668) [Link]

A full featured opensource calendar server (caldav) that's production quality is already extant, also in python, http://trac.calendarserver.org/
It underlies the group calendaring functionality in osx server.

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 27, 2011 18:00 UTC (Tue) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link] (4 responses)

I've been working on a WebDAV / CalDAV server for a couple of years - also using vobject. OpenGroupware Coils.

But what is really need is better client support; especially on mobile devices like Android.

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Dec 27, 2011 21:05 UTC (Tue) by keithp (subscriber, #5140) [Link] (3 responses)

The non-free CardDAV and CalDAV plugins in the android market seem to work fine for me. There's also aCal, a GPLv3+ stand-alone calendar/contacts application written by Andrew McMillan, but I haven't managed to get that working with Calypso yet, although it is reported to work with Radicale.

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Jan 4, 2012 14:19 UTC (Wed) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link] (2 responses)

It would be really nice to have a forum/list somewhere for Groupware developers of various stripes to report the idiosyncracies / statuses of all the various clients.

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Jan 5, 2012 15:00 UTC (Thu) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link] (1 responses)

Something like http://calconnect.org/caldeveloperlist.shtml perhaps?

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution

Posted Jan 9, 2012 16:45 UTC (Mon) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link]

Yes, exactly. Thanks for the link.

Calypso - CalDAV/CardDAV for Android and Thunderbird

Posted Jan 8, 2012 21:31 UTC (Sun) by dagb (guest, #30984) [Link]

I did a quick and dirty test with calypso, thunderbird/lightning and AnDal (an android caldav calendar with a timelimited demo). It works, and syncs both ways. Yay! I much prefer this over horde....

As for CardDAV, there is no support for that in Thunderbird. Yet.
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https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=546932 <- bug
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