Phase One Calendar Plan

lpaulriddle

It turns out, from my readings on the net, that iCal is a little limited with regards to publishing remote calendars and subscribing to them. You can either publish, or subscribe, but not both. That knocks iCal down a few pegs in my book, but it still seems to be the best option going for Palm synchronization, so I’m still going to build my initial calendaring solution around it. I won’t have all the functionality that I want, but it will be a good start.

Incidentally, after my initial experimentation with Sunbird, I went back and read more about it. It turns out the version I was using, version 0.3alpha, is based on a total code rewrite and is actually less stable than its predecessor, version 0.2. I tried 0.2 out, and it doesn’t seem to suffer from the crashing problems I had with 0.3alpha. In fact, I can subscribe to and edit a remote WebDAV calendar just fine. iCal cannot do this (presumably because Apple wants to sell me a .mac membership to get this functionality). This, coupled with the fact that Sunbird works on Mac, Windows and Linux, makes me lean towards Sunbird as my ultimate Calendaring solution. However, as Sunbird does not have Palm sync support yet, I’m still stuck with iCal for the time being. So here’s what I’m going to do:

  1. Shell out the $40 for the Missing Sync product, to get tightly integrated Palm sync support for iCal. Hope the product works as well as advertised.
  2. Load all of my calendar data into iCal (export data out of Oracle Calendar and merge any local changes that I put into Palm Desktop)
  3. Publish all of my iCal calendars to my WebDAV server so I can view them with PHP iCalendar. Set up autopublish so they stay up to date.
  4. Try out the Oracle Calendar SDK. It would be nice to have a command line tool to export the data out of Oracle Calendar and automatically generate a .ics file that I can subscribe to with iCal.

This will give me most of the functionality I’m after. I’ll be able to view, but not edit, the published calendars with PHP iCalendar or Sunbird. To edit them I’ll either need to use iCal on my laptop, or my Palm. Not perfect, but livable.