Implementation Idea: adherence to CalDAV for event planning

[jordanofoster]

Considering implementing CalDAV within backend

This issue is merely to illustrate a potential good path, since planning.md prefers that we keep our options open. CalDAV may be our best 'communications' standard to handle calendarized event planning. The standard actually uses iCalendar to store data, so we could meet Could-have #3.

Relevant RFCs

• RFC 4791
  • Defines the access protocol for CalDAV
• RFC 6638
  • Defines the scheduling extensions to CalDAV
• RFC 4918
  • Defines WebDAV, so perhaps not relevant - but putting here just in case.

Potential Issues

• We must parse the iCalendar items because servers must support calendaring-specific options (not sure on the specifics of this)
• Can persons mark themselves as "interested" in the event with this?
• Furthermore, can we assign attendance to CalDAV entries?
• CalDAV is a large standard, so this might be a bit big in scale for a Hackathon.
  • Existing servers do not implement all of CalDAV, however - and still function just fine.
    • Perhaps this means we can limit scope to just what we'd need?
• If we want our calendar to be tied to Exchange (i.e., NTU's e-mail infrastructure), we might struggle to make it interoperable
  • This is hardly a new problem though, so I imagine it's not one without solutions, or attempts thereof.
• General standards bloat...
  • Want to try and make sure we don't spend the hackathon just reading RFCs, or accidentally make it too difficult to contribute by trying to do it this way.

    Why do it this way?

• CalDAV is universally supported by a number of software solutions, meaning our calendar backend may be more portable.
• This could make implementing a JS-based embed easier too, if most existing solutions we could draw upon (FOSS) also use CalDAV.

[LukeBillo]

Hey @jordanofoster,

This seems like a really good fit. It's looking like we're going to be using C# / .NET for the back-end, so I've had a quick look around and found CalDAV.NET as well, which we could use. It seems a bit outdated, so we may need to fork it and update dependencies though.

I'll have more of a look later when we're further into development, but to be honest, I see no reason not to go down the CalDAV route.

[jordanofoster]

Closing this issue as we're deciding to go with the Google Calendar API instead for ease-of-use with existing DevSoc e-mails.