Mozilla Calls on User Community Today for Testing

lisah writes "As Mozilla prepares to release updates for its calendar applications Sunbird and Lightning, project developers are calling on the user community to participate in the final stages of testing. The Mozilla Calendar Team has proclaimed today as Test Case Writing Day and users worldwide are encouraged to participate. Mozilla developer Clint Talbert tells NewsForge that today's event is a pre-cursor to the Calendar Test Day Mozilla will hold later this month prior to the final release of version 0.3."

Re-neter all your dates again, I suppose

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's only alpha so I shouldn't complain, but every time they release a new version, I have to enter all my dates again because they've changed the storage format again. I don't suppose this time will be any diferent. I've got a lot of history that I don't want to lose. I think I'll stick with v2 until they relese 1.0.

Lots of Calendar news lately

[Kunta Kinte]

Lightning supports CalDAV [isoc.org] for sharing calendar information. Apple announced yesterday that Leopard iCal Server and the iCal application will both talk CalDAV, they released the server at http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/collaboration [macosforge.org]. Bedework [bedework.org] is making a lot of progress as an institutional calendar server.

Oracle has a CalDAV stack. IBM has some stuff in the works as well.

It looks like exchange will have a fight on its hands very soon.

I've been helping on a CalDAV plugin for Outlook called Open Connector [openconnector.org], which allows Outlook to take to CalDAV servers like Apple's and Bedework. We always need help, if you have a lot of experience developing COM apps in C++, come help out.

Re:Lots of Calendar news lately

[Albanach]

I've been using the Outlook 2003 remote calendars [sourceforge.net] plugin which is effective in allowing you to share your calendar on Outlook with Thunderbird / Evolution etc.

Re:Lots of Calendar news lately

[laffer1]

Apple's calendaring server site says that you must have iCal from 10.5 seed to use it. I'm guessing there is something different with caldav vs the old system of just throwing up ical files via webdav.

Re:Lots of Calendar news lately

[Kunta Kinte]

By the way, iCal isn't an Apple format; although it was invented there, it's been submitted as a standard IIRC.

I don't think so. iCal, ie. iCalendar is RFC 2445. Microsoft and Lotus employees are listed as principals on that one. That became a standard in '98.

What Apple did, unfortunately, is choose the iCal name for their application. A name most people used to refer to the files conforming to RFC 2445 and others.

Re:Lots of Calendar news lately

[Kunta Kinte]

I'm guessing there is something different with caldav vs the old system of just throwing up ical files via webdav.

Yes. The old system wasn't really a standard. Eg. How can the client figure out your free/busy time? Or how should the files be name? etc.

CalDAV specifies storage, and also the reporting of the stored calendar data. So the calendar client can ask 'What events happen between th 10th and 14th?' or a query for appointments in the month of June, etc. without downloading an entire folder of *.ics files.

The situation is much improved.

Re:Profit!

[mr_mischief]

I have no mod points today, but MS does open betas and release candidiates too. I still remember, in fact, when the "final" release candidate for Windows98 worked perfectly with my friend's hardware, then the retail version trashed the contents of his hard drive every time he tried to install it.

QED. Do I get a cookie?