Hi everyone, I’m Maximilian Odendahl, a software engineer at Sun Microsystems and happy to share some exciting news with you. As Sun is a big supporter of the CalDAV protocol and is committed to driving it forward, I’m currently working on one of the first contributions after the platform was opened: CalDAV support for Symbian OS, as defined by RFC 4791.
CalDAV is a relatively new, open calendar access standard, which quickly gained support within the industry and is now implemented by all major calendar server vendors, including Sun Microsystems, Google, Apple and others. Many desktop clients, such as Mozilla Thunderbird/Lightning and Apple iCal, provide CalDAV support and are able to sync with these servers out-of-the-box. The Apple iPhone supports CalDAV synchronization as well now, though it only synchronizes events and no to do items.
It is therefore highly desirable for Symbian – and any other mobile platform – to support CalDAV out-of-the-box for many personal, business and enterprise use cases.
Development started during the summer with close cooperation with the Organizer Package owner, Sharad Upadhyay from Nokia. We have just finished adding multiple calendar syncing support and are now just missing a user interface integration, for which we are waiting for some preliminary work to be done by Nokia. We would like to merge it afterwards into the main MCL code line to have CalDAV support enabled for Symbian^3.
To ensure high quality and integration with a large number of different servers, the code is not only tested against our latest Calendar Server 7 release, but against a wide range of other CalDAV implementations as well using an automated test suite. The CalDAV connector was also shown and tested against additional servers at the CalConnect XVI interoperability event earlier this month, which was a great opportunity to iron out some remaining bugs.
Additional and latest up-to-date information, as well as some potential ideas for future additions, can be found here. If you have any questions, suggestions or anything else you would like to share, please do not hesitate to contact us. I’m also looking forward to meeting you in person at the Symbian Exchange & Exposition 2009. There will be also a talk about the CalDAV contribution as well as the experience of an outside contributor on Tuesday, 10/27/2009, 5 pm, as well as a Hands-On Lab session at 1 pm. Looking forward to talking to you!
5 Comments
Sun tested their CalDAV client plug-in at the last CalConnect Interoperability Test Event earlier this month (October 5-7) against multiple CalDAV servers and seemed pleased with how the tests progressed.
Dave Thewlis
Executive Director, CalConnect
I’ve been meaning to ask, and I realise this is not exactly the right thread, but here goes:
I’ve seen some of these (paraphrasing heavily) “Major contribution from X was received and it now goes [IF I'VE UNDERSTOOD CORRECTLY
] to this multistep approval process by the Council” posts here, and some of them seem blatantly obvious no brainers (such as “get rid of doubletap” that the SF foundation staff or at the very least the council itself (without having to wait for these “Contributions) should (in my honest opininion) be able to integrate to the SF platform on their own (and I though e.g. that move to single tap throughout was part of the roadmap anyway).
My point is: if integration of changes is as bureaucratic as it seems, I wonder how you can ensure and maintain the speed of (at times indeed obvious looking) needed changes to the OS and UI?
Would very much appreciate some illumination on this.
@Viipottaja: Only big contributions need to be approved by the councils. For example the addition of CalDAV support did not need to get approved by the councils. In some cases, a contributor may decide to go through the councils, because it provides a more formal way to get feedback, to ensure that nobody else is privately working on the same problem or to help ensure that a contribution will go into all Symbian devices.
The following document gives you a good ovverview: http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Contribution_Process
please let me know when this app is ready.
thanks,
JT
When will this become available. We are very interesed in this functionality.
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[...] an update on their CalDAV client plug-in for the Symbian Operating system on the Symbian blog. See http://blog.symbian.org/2009/10/22/caldav-support-for-symbian-a-contribution-by-sun-microsystems/ for the full [...]
[...] finally, CalDAV evolves to a pretty common standard. sun microsystems is about to contribute a client for symbian: blog.symbian.org. [...]