Thursday, February 4, 2010

CalDAV/CardDAV/GroupDAV Support for Akonadi

Another month, another new resource for Akonadi ;) Well, actually the resource has been started by Grégory Oestreicher 3 month ago and just recently I came across the code in playground and gave it a try. After some code cleanup (to simplify the later move to kdepim/runtime/resources) I started to refactor some parts of the resource to better match the design of Akonadi. Some of the features have been removed during that work (e.g. only reload data that have been changed on the server), but they will come back in the future.
Initially the resource was designed to support the CalDAV protocol and the calendaring part of the GroupDAV protocol, because these two protocols are basically the same, with some small differences, most of the code for listing, loading and saving events and todos can be shared.
However the GroupDAV protocol supports handling of contacts as well and there is a new standard, called CardDAV, which is the contact handling equivalent to CalDAV. The logical consequence was to add support for CardDAV and adapt the GroupDAV implementation to handle contacts as well. While we are still working on iron out some bugs and test the resource against all free available groupware servers, we plan for the future...

At the moment you'll see a configuration dialog like this:




Here you can configure which protocol to use, what the URLs for the protocol handlers are and what login credentials shall be used. Unfortunately that's much to technically. In the ideal world one would have a configuration dialog that provides a list of supported groupware servers and input fields for the login credentials, everything else should be setup automatically by the resource. And that's indeed the next big task on our TODO list, so be excited :)

Now follows another screenshot of akonadiconsole with two resources loaded (one for CardDav and one for CalDav) that a configured to access the SOGo demo system: