This most up-to-date version of this document is available in the docs directory in the CVS repository. Reasonably up-to-date versions are also accessible on the University of Washington and the RPI CCT websites.
UW Calendar is an open-source calendaring system designed for institutions of higher education. UW Calendar supports personal and public events and will support group events. It uses existing open standards, and supports web-based and other forms of access, including CalDAV and portal integration.
The mission statement for UW Calendar reads, in part, "UW Calendar will be a total calendaring and events system for institutions of higher learning. UW Calendar will be open source and platform independent. It will use existing open standards where possible, especially the standards of the IETF Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group. It will support integration with other systems and middleware, particularly open systems such as uPortal and Shibboleth. It will be modular, so an institution can deploy only the components it needs, and extensible, so an institution can build any new component it needs."
The open source UW Calendar was originally based on a University of Washington production system, which in turn was based on the WebCal web calendaring program. We don't particularly like the name UW Calendar, but attempts to find a new name that is both clever and not yet claimed by another web application, have so far proved surprisingly difficult.
Skinnable public events web client, personal calendar web client, public events admin web client, CalDAV, SyncML, dump/restore utilities, RSS feeds, portlet support. Public/personal calendar integration, including subscribing to public calendars and adding individual public events to a personal calendar.
Individual events, not entire calendars, can be downloaded, but not synchronized in the current production release.
We have a pre-production version (which needs to be repackaged for general distribution) of synchronization using SyncML. Currently, it is possible to synch with MS-Outlook with the iCalendar Synch Client. Support for Palm, PocketPCs or PDAs can be added. The implementation consists of a small synchronization framework to connect a calendar server with a synch server.
Our goal is to support RFC 2445. Currently, only a portion of that standard is implemented. We have implemented a subset of the CalDAV standard draft version 5.
Recurring events are not presently supported. We anticipate supporting recurrence in the near future.
Required: Java 1.4, an application server that understands the standard Java servlet API (2.4), a database with a JDBC driver
Used: Struts, Synch4j 2.2 (for SyncML support), Jetspeed-2, Ical4j , Java / J2EE, XML, XSLT
The quickstart version uses Tomcat 5.0.28, Ant 1.6.2, and HSQLDB 1.7.3.3, but none of these are required.
We currently use Ant. There has been
some debate of the use of Maven.
Memorial University has had some success
using Eclipse and has produced a howto document.
The Quickstart distribution contains an entire runtime environment, including a database and application server, so that you need to download nothing except a Java runtime environment. The Quickstart is intended to be easily installed for demonstration purposes, and serve as a basis for your own customized version.
Download Quickstart, which includes usage instructions in the README file. Familiarize yourself with Quickstart as distributed before you attempt to customize UW Calendar.
There are authentication, database, presentation (look and feel) issues:
A proof of concept portlet version has been demonstrated using the JetSpeed2 portal-struts bridge. We are looking at getting the calendar running as a portlet in other portals. Options include writing a native JSR 168 front end, probably a modification of the current front end, or implementing the appropriate interface to get the portal-struts bridge running in the target portal.
UW Calendar does not currently support resource scheduling.
UW Calendar supports personal calendars, but does not currently support sharing personal calendars