1.4. Participant General Comments

The following are various notes and reports from the participants. The wording has been changed to remove identification of products where possible.

This was my first interop (of any kind), so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. What I found was a pretty intense combination of testing, debugging and writing code. It was definitely good to fire off questions at server authors, and, if something turned out to be a problem on their side, be able to proceed after they had fixed it.

It was also clear that several vendors were arriving with pretty recent implementations of some CalDAV features, so it was good to feel that we were all helping one another shake out some of the corner cases.

One client started out being a pure WebDAV client, and CalDAV support is being added afterward. As a result, we worked better against servers that are WebDAV-oriented. Testing against the more calendar-based servers turned up useful bugs.

This interop was a very interesting experience and the additional participants helped in finding more interoperability problems.

The experience was again very valuable but at times it was difficult to tell what was going on. I think the arrangement for next time will address a lot of that. Ensuring everyone can devote a stretch of time without being dragged out will help. I don’t know if we can timetable tests or encourage people to be clearer about which server they are testing against. By it’s very nature it’s somewhat intensive and that’s a large part of its value but if more vendors take part it might become a little uncontrolled.

I think encouraging server developers to make the server available ahead of time — say for the week preceding — and encouraging the client people to run through the tests — would weed out some of the simpler bugs. It might also bring to mind some topics for discussion ahead of time.

One vendor was able to test its CalDAV desktop client, web client and server with other servers and clients at the interop. Overall we found interoperability to be good. In a couple of situations there were areas where servers had not yet implemented functionality, but in several cases they were able to make modifications and get those working during the interop. Other minor issues were fixed during the course of the interop.