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1. Report

The interoperability test event at CalConnect I, hosted by 1&1 in their Bucharest, Romania office, took place on Monday May 18 through Wednesday noon May 20. The facilities were excellent and allowed all participants to begin testing immediately.

There were 6 members participating onsite represented by 12 individuals. Participating entities were:

  • 1&1 (the hosts)

  • Apple

  • fruux

  • Google

  • RPI (Bedework)

  • YouCanBook.me

As is usual we spent some time on discussions — during the interoperability event these are often of a more technical and protocol oriented nature. These can involve the group as a whole or take the form of small break out discussions with a subset of the attendees. A brief discussion on API issues led to the decision that Evert Pot of fruux would produce some proposals for us to look at during the conference.

Following on from some previous testing there was a discussion on iMIP issues. Cyrus Daboo of Apple talked about his proposed mail header to identify calendar content in mail messages.

There were also some discussions about the overall approach of CardDAV and in particular how to implement groups and how this would affect sharing. There was also some discussion about the CardDAV tests available in the Darwin calendar server test suite.

YouCanBook.me felt this was “a really valuable session of testing”. Their service effectively acts as a client to a number of online calendar services and they carried out a significant amount of testing against those services. In particular they were carrying out final testing of their new CalDAV link which is now working well with fruux, iCloud and 1&1. Additionally:

  • They improved their detection of the primary calendar status through CalDAV and are now filtering out non-VEVENT calendar collections properly

  • They fixed a number of URL illegal character bugs and worked with fruux to signal their fruux interface

  • They tuned the PROPFIND calls for 1&1 and identified a missing slash issue

  • They built a new link through to iCloud and logged a bug to do with descriptions on MKCALENDAR calls

The other big step forward for YouCanBook.me was talking to everyone about the main status property at the VEVENT level — in particular for “tentative” status. This is something they hope to use, but need more support from clients. They expect to file bug reports or feature requests on this topic in the coming months. This, of course, is a feature which will be of use to many others.

As always, the result for many of the server developers were a number of bug fixes.

Mike Douglass, CalConnect Interoperability Test Manager