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1. Report

The September 2015 Calendar Interoperability event took place in Amsterdam, Netherlands hosted by Gershon Janssen.

There were 9 members participating onsite represented by 12 individuals. Participating entities were:

  • 1&1 (the hosts)

  • Apple

  • Mozilla

  • Oracle

  • Spherical Cow Group (Bedework)

  • SmoothSync

  • Stylite

  • YouCanBook.me

  • Zimbra

Additionally present were Gershon Janssen, the host, and as ever Dave Thewlis, Executive Director.

There was the usual testing of CalDAV as a number of participants continue to implement features of that protocol. There were a number of client implementations at the event which allowed for fairly extensive testng.

In addition to the usual testing of protocols we had other items which occupied our time:

There was a lot of interest in the new WebDAV server info document (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-douglass-server-info). This allows clients to determine what features are available from a service and to cache the information. It allows us to reduce the number of headers being transferred and also allows for more complex information and a way for servers to indicate the feature set has changed. We had implementations from 3 servers and 2 clients — all done during the meeting. The specification went through a number of rapid iterations as we built the code.

We had planned for some work on the Apple CalDAV test suite to try to improve its usability in continuous testing environments. Ralf Becker of Stylite developed at the meeting a php tool which creates a SQLite database of test results and also provides a number of querying options. This work will probably continue between meetings and we will revisit it at the next event.

There were a number of discussions that took place during the event. For previous sessions we had tried to move these discussions to a separate room away from the main testing venue. However, we have come to realize that these discussions are of some interest to all participants and that they often provide unexpected insights. For the near future at least we will probably have these discussions as part of the main event. Topics covered the server information document, the new devguide work and possible extensions.

Once again, this has been a useful event for the participants. Our thanks go to Gershon Janssen for hosting the event and his attentiveness during the testing.

Mike Douglass, Spherical Cow Group, CalConnect Interoperability Test Manager