CalDAV

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CalDAV is a proposal for a standard protocol to enable calendar access via WebDAV.

The CalDAV specification was first published in 2003 by Lisa Dusseault as an Internet-Draft submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and it quickly gained support from several calendaring software vendors. In January 2005 the first interoperability event was organized by the CalConnect consortium. CalDAV does not have an IETF Working Group but the authors still plan to submit it as an IETF standard. CalDAV is designed for implementation by any collaborative software, client or server, that needs to maintain, access or share collections of events. It is being developed as an open standard to foster interoperability between software from different implementors.

The architecture of CalDAV is to model events, which may be meetings or appointments or blocked-off-time, as HTTP resources. Each event is expressed in the standard iCalendar format. Thus, any Web browser can download a standard representation of an event. Events are organized into WebDAV collections to allow browsing and synchronization. In addition to HTTP (RFC2616) and WebDAV (RFC2518) functionality, a CalDAV server must support WebDAV access control (RFC3744), must parse iCalendar files (RFC2445) and support a number of calendaring-specific operations such as doing free-busy time reports and expansion of recurring events. With this functionality, a user may synchronize his or her own calendar to a CalDAV server, and share it among multiple devices or with other users. The protocol also supports non-personal calendars, such as calendars for sites or organizations.

Some developers have criticized CalDAV's complexity, claiming that the difficulty of implementing it will lead to implementations that can exhibit small bugs when talking to each other, much as has happened with IMAP for mail. However, many organizations have committed to providing CalDAV products and serious momentum is now building behind having it become a viable standard for calendaring and scheduling across the internet.

On August 7, 2006, Apple announced that Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" will include iCal 3.0, an application that supports the CalDAV access and scheduling standards.[1] Leopard Server will also include iCal Server, which implements the CalDAV access and scheduling protocols.[2]. The iCal Server has been released as open source as the Darwin Calendar Server.[3]

Up-to-date CalDAV information can be found at the CalDAV home page.

[edit] See also

WebDAV
GroupDAV, an effort to create a simplified, straightforward protocol for calendars as well as contacts.
iCalendar
Calendar
Scheduling OSID defines a software interface abstraction for calendaring protocols