Forum .LRN Q&A: Adding every conceivable feature to the Calendar package

1: Adding every conceivable feature to the Calendar package

Posted by Rich Graves on 10/11/02 01:53 AM

Get a load of this:

http://www.washington.edu/ucal/require.html

That looks like a big project, eh?

We're looking around because Oracle has announced that Oracle Calendar
(formerly Steltor Calendar (formerly CS&T Calendar (formerly Netscape
Calendar (formerly OEM'd from CS&T's predecessor)))) will cease to
exist as a standalone application in 2004. Brandeis has been a happy
...Calendar user for 5 years. The rest of Oracle's communication
software, only a mother could love (Oracle Corporation appears to be
the only customer for Oracle Mail Server, Oracle Voicemail, etc.).

dotlrn does personal and public calendaring reasonably well. It does
not do resource or group scheduling at all (yes you can do groups, but
you can't "invite" someone to a meeting in the sense of MeetingMaker,
Oracle Calendar, Exchange/Outlook, or Ximian Evolution).

Is anyone [else] interested in the massive undertaking of adding such
features to dotlrn calendar or some other module?

University of Washington does have a history of shooting for the moon
and succeeding, but we're small and we'd rather not get into another
platform when we already have ACS.

Any other recommendations for something that could potentially replace
*both* Oracle Calendar (think Exchange/Outlook), which does
group/personal calendaring only, and the ACS 3.x-based public-only
calendar we've got on my.brandeis.edu?

2: Response to Adding every conceivable feature to the Calendar package (response to 1)

Posted by Andrei Popov on 10/15/02 05:40 PM

Does it not look more like a dotWRK issue? An intranet application of calendar, integration (if possible) with mail gateway/webmail service, etc...

3: Response to Adding every conceivable feature to the Calendar package (response to 1)

Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 10/16/02 04:56 AM

Andrei, here is something I remember from Biology 101:

"A species is a poplation or group of populations whose members have the potential to interbreed with one another in nature to produce fertile offspring"

It may not fit perfectly, but I am sure you get the idea.

Rich, we are interested, but we are busy with other stuff at the moment and can not commit.

4: Re: Adding every conceivable feature to the Calendar package (response to 1)

Posted by Rich Graves on 10/30/03 03:06 AM

Just a little update on this year-old thread:

Over my objections, the webdev team here built an ACS 3.x calendar module with many new features of local interest. http://my.brandeis.edu/btime/

5: Re: Adding every conceivable feature to the Calendar package (response to 4)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 10/30/03 06:15 AM

Really nice. I like that. Maybe Dirk can get hold of the code and move some of it over to 5.1 calendar ?

6: Re: Adding every conceivable feature to the Calendar package (response to 1)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 10/30/03 09:55 AM

It is unlikely that I would be able to reuse any code directly (that is the price of forking), but I'd be able to lift some ideas. So definitely send it down my way.

As important would be a list of things you changed in order of importance. That helps a lot in determining what needs to be worked on functionality-wise. The link to washington.edu is an interesting start, but as such just an all-encompassing wishlist.

I promised to post my "work on calendar" plans, so I will keep up to my promise - and do so next week :)

7: Re: Adding every conceivable feature to the Calendar package (response to 4)

Posted by Nagita Karunaratne on 01/02/04 06:09 PM

Is it possible to get at least the UI code for this calendar module distributed?

8: Re: Adding every conceivable feature to the Calendar package (response to 1)

Posted by Aaron Rubin on 01/06/04 04:03 PM

I am the lead developer of Web Services over at Brandeis, and I oversaw (and did) much of the programming for the new calendar. I have posted 2 tarballs for you to grab at your leisure.

The first file contains the libraries used for btime: btime-libs.tar.gz

The second contains all of the views, acl pages, and type managment: btime-views.tar.gz

This version is a combination of the features that we liked from the original ACS calendar, and Oracle calendar. We implemented ACL's which are access contols to allow users/groups to create and/or view events on another user's/group's calendar. The plans for the next version are to tighten this up a bit, and bring the model closer to that of Oracle calendar

Location is linked to buildings on our campus map (Go There) so you can probably ignore it, or would have to rework it somehow.

If you have any questions or suggesstions I would be happy to get involved and to hear ways to make make things work better!

9: Re: Adding every conceivable feature to the Calendar package (response to 8)

Posted by Nagita Karunaratne on 01/06/04 07:38 PM

Thanks Aaron,

Sorry for the very terse request.

I really liked the design particularily the way some features go unnoticed unless the user is looking for it (like indenting the current time in the Day View). Also it looks just as good on a bigger screen as it does on a 14" laptop.

However I cannot download btime-libs.tar.gz
There are no spelling error in the link.

Nagita

10: Re: Adding every conceivable feature to the Calendar package (response to 1)

Posted by Aaron Rubin on 01/06/04 08:16 PM

Not a problem...

The links weren't working due to a server redirect I forgot about. Here they are:
libs.tar.gz
views.tar.gz

Thanks for the compliments, we are pretty happy with how it looks too!

11: Re: Adding every conceivable feature to the Calendar package (response to 9)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 01/06/04 08:16 PM

Hey, thanks a lot. I'll lift as much as possible for OpenACS' calendar.