The CalDAV specification has been under development for a few years now, and now there is an open source solution for shared calendaring implementations.
The authors of DAViCal have evaluated the possibilities for shared calendaring, and have elected to follow the path of implementing CalDAV because they believe it is a good specification and that it will in due course gain client implementations and provide the richest user experience through those client implementations. CalDav extends on WebDAV.
CalDAV is a client-server protocol specific to managing and reporting on collections of calendar resources. In this implementation the authors have chosen to use the Apache web server because it is also widely available. They have also chosen to use the PostgreSQL database, because it is a free, open-source database, which operates on a very wide set of operating environments, and which is fully ACID compliant.
If you have a need, not only to subscribe to shared calendars, but to be able to set permissions to different users and groups of users, such as read/write, read/only (i.e. subscribe), or busy/not-busy, DAViCal is for you.
It works with many Calendar clients such as:
- Evolution
- Mozilla Calendar (Mozilla Lightning & Mozilla Sunbird)
- Mulberry
- Chandler
- Cadaver
- Kontact
- iCal 3.0.1, from OS 10.5, with DAViCal release 0.9.2 onwards
DAViCal CalDAV Server was conceived and written by Andrew McMillan, who can be contacted in IRC (irc.oftc.net#davical).
More about the iCalendar standard.
