Connectors for Lightning/Sunbird

As of Lightning/Sunbird version 0.3, there are three supported remote calendar protocols:

1. WCAP (Sun ONE's XML/RPC calendar protocol), which is implemented in Sunbird's mozilla/calendar/providers/wcap sources. It uses plain-old GET and POST commands, and its online specification is at Overview and Commands.

2. iCalendar, which uses the PUT method to send the complete updated calendar to the same Zimbra URL. This could get very inefficient with large calendars, and then Zimbra would have to delete events from the calendar folder to make sure there aren't duplicates. It also uses a PROPFIND, which is rejected by Tomcat.

3. CalDAV, which uses the REPORT method to get a listing of calendar entries, and PUT to update them (neither of which are supported by Tomcat). [Edit: I don't think this is true. "Cosmo is a CALDAV server, based on tomcat." Indicates Tomcat has everything needed to do CalDAV.]

FYI - Zimbra has been working on CalDav in our mainline code base. Goal is to test/release this once iCal has a released version of their support. So longer term CalDav may be better (I know this is different to what we've said in the past since with iCal there is a mainstream client that will have support. We'd love to have Lightning/Sunbird use this support as well. --KevinH 10:50, 20 February 2007 (CST)

michael-fig writes: It looks like WCAP is the way to go. It's apparently more work to add REPORT and PUT to Tomcat than to implement the WCAP interface. So, I'm writing a servlet to implement WCAP. I'll keep updating this page with progress.

You can download the project files from my site.

2006-10-20 - Took an all-night crash course in Java and Tomcat. Now the http://ZIMBRA-SERVER/service/wcap URL is responding to requests.

2007-01-17 - Got authentication working. I thought I was doing the right thing to get appointment listings, but they just return empty calendars. Thunderbird complains that it cannot find the primary calendar owner, either.

2007-01-18 - Fixed some bugs and upgraded my Lightning WCAP to the latest nightly build. Now I can view events from any of the Zimbra user's subscribed calendars.

2007-01-19 - View recurrences.

Priorities:

1) storeevents from Thunderbird to Zimbra.

2) get_freebusy to make scheduling appointments possible.

3) refreshing with fetch_deletedcomponents and fetchcomponents_by_lastmod.