Earlier this week I represented OSAF at the 4th CalConnect Interop. This entailed spending a day and half in a room with a bunch of other calendaring vendors, trying to make sure that our software works with theirs.

Most of the work I did involved CalDAV client-server testing. Besides OSAF’s own Cosmo, there were servers from Novell, RPI and Oracle to test against. It turns out that these servers work sufficiently differently from ours that they exposed interesting and useful bugs in our CalDAV client implementation.

Two other CalDAV clients besides Chandler were represented: Mozilla’s Sunbird client, and Evolution (with CalDAV plugin). Brian Moseley had set up a machine at OSAF where he could debug a test server, and was available on IRC to help diagnose problems. Both Evolution and Sunbird use a different method of downloading events from a CalDAV server than Chandler, so Brian (with the help of Bobby Rullo) was able to chase down a couple of good bugs.

In the remaining time, I was able to squeeze in some testing of interoperability of ICalendar (.ics) files with other vendors, including Novell Groupwise, EVDB and Trumba. This, too, turned up a couple of interesting bugs.

All in all, it was very helpful to devote some time to interoperability, especially in an environment where you can discuss issues with other developers, and, in some cases, resolve or work around them. Thanks to CalConnect for organising, and to Novell for hosting us in their lovely Executive Briefing suite.