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1. Report

The event was hosted by Open-Xchange in Cologne, Germany on September 25-27, 2017.

In attendance for this interoperability event and developers forum were:

  • Mike Douglass Spherical Cow Group — managing the event

  • Ken Murchison, Robert Stepanek for Fastmail

  • Thomas Schäfer for 1&1

  • Marten Gajda for dmfs

  • Gren Eliot for Zimbra

  • Ralf Becker for eGroupware

  • Martin Herfurth and Tobias Friedrich for Open-Xchange

  • Peter Tam for Ribose

There was a significant amount of discussion around the new JSCalendar draft which also spilled over into discussions on vCard. The JSCalendar specification is now felt to be relatively stable and as yet there are few comments on the draft from outside CalConnect.The IETF will be contacted to see if we can move this into a working group.

There were some discussions about the relative merit of multiple RFCs for different aspects of the standard (events v tasks) as against a single all encompassing draft.

This led on to a discussion of the contacts api and the desire to come up with a format for contacts that is based on the JSCalendar work. One idea is to define a common data model for contacts, independent from data format and exchange protocols. Robert and Peter will share the current work documents to see what’s the overlap.

Additionally Peter has been working on a GraphQL-based contacts API. The intent is to propose this as a standard at some point.

FastMail with the Cyrus server worked on subscription upgrade with dmfs and successfully tested with WebCal-Sync. It should be noted how recurrence overrides are handled. Some additional points on subscription upgrade:

  • Prefer=minimal will cause VTIMEZONEs to NOT be returned in subscription upgrade. It can be overridden by using CalDAV-Timezones:T

  • Realized that CalDAV-Timezones SHOULD/MUST be included in Vary header when server supports TZ-by-ref and subscription upgrade There was some work done switching DEVGUIDE from old to new infrastructure. This required a DNS change and bugfixing redirects.

There was a lot of work around the CalDAV tester. Apple is no longer maintaining this tool so we are free to apply our own updates to a CalConnect maintained copy. There was some discussion around how we should avoid conflicts — the suggestion is to create a ticket for a test or test you want to work on. Committing back to the core should be fine at least at this stage.

Some work was started on trying to build bootstrap code into the tester. For many servers this will remove the need fo a lot of configuration as the tester should be able to discover most of what it needs.

Open-Xchange had been discouraged by the enormous number of failures in the original tester.

During this session they managed to get much further — concentrating on a smaller number fo tests.

Ralf for eGroupware has implemented caldavtester — a wrapper around the Apple originated tester. This provides a GUI, options for selecting tests and features to determine what changes happened as a result of server updates. Some work was done to add new feature to that tool.

A number of changes were also made to some tests to make them less Apple specific — fro example, redirects now accept all valid http redirect codes. As the large number of errors were reduced we all find that errors in our own server code surface.

Zimbra also did some work on fixing an issue with shared addressbooks not visible from iOS / CardDAV-Sync on Android.

Further discussions covered:

  • iTip improvements: new response for scheduling requests

  • Optimistic updates

  • The need to check the CalDAV specification wrt caching proxies

In all this was a very productive session.