Model Mismatch

Interoperability is a stone cold *expletive deleted*. When writing a PIM or any other calendar app, you will pick wrong. Just get used to it.

Here is what I mean:

In the calendar world their is only one viable standard for the exchanged info : the icalendar file format. It can be exchanged in multiple ways, though the
CalDAV protocol (Sits on Top of WebDAV which sits on HTTP) is becoming the exchange method of choice.

But whos should we use ? Lots of applications support it. But Microsoft's ICalendar format is not always in sync with Google's and so on AND it is not even anyone's fault. The areas where things fall down are often where the spec itself has issues such as recurring events and events that last all day.

When does an all day event start ? 00:00:01 or 00:00:00 ?

When does an all day event end ? 23:59:59 or 24:00:00 (oh wait, thats 00:00:00) oops.

Those questions just begin to touch on the issues.

Whichever way you handle all day events you will have to do accurate conversions to the other way or risk all sorts of "round trip translation errors". If you have synchronized your PIM with another and back again you have probably already run into this....

There are conferences and technical groups that spend days just battling with how to specify and manage recurring events. Look for "IIOP Recurring Events"

Most PIMs solve this by closely adhering to the icalendar specification for their domain model. Thats great where the spec really works but their are some key things that don''t appear to be covered or are incompletely specified. i.e. Tagging and taxonomies, the same events in multiple calendars, hierarchical tasks and events, and so on. I am not yet an expert on icalendar but I will become solidly familiar with it over the next few weeks. Luckily icalendar provides an extension mechanism so that the application specific information can be captured. Of course, other applications won't use the info and some of them won't even preserve it (Google's icalendar support seems to remove tasks from the calenar).

My project for next weekend is to try and do a full round trip between Google calendar and the Saltation domain model using Google's Calendar API and maybe using the icalendar file format.

6.21.09 I wrote this post on 6.19.09 and then posted it today. As I go back and look at what Google actually supports I am stunned. To try and push through the Google API looks like a decent amount of work for little initial return. I think I am going to work first on FULL icalendar file format support (import and export) next weekend and then look at publishing and reading from Google directly. At least debugging the process will be simpler.