iCal4j Services

A collection of iCalendar functions delivered as HTTP services.

Overview

iCal4j services is a collection of libraries that support deployment as a service. For example:

Each of these libraries are bundled with an HTTP Servlet and may be deployed either in a Web container or standalone with an embedded Jetty server. They are stateless services and containerisation will be supported to provide maximum choice in how they are deployed.

Chaining Services

iCal4j services are designed to be able to chain them together to customise according to your requirements.

For example, if you need to send a meeting invitation to a group of individuals you can achieve this as follows:

 ical4j template meeting | ical4j useragent request | ical4j integration send

Here we are using iCal4j template to create a meeting invitation, user agent to format for email, and integration to send the email to all recipients.

Alternatively, you can listen for requests, validate and add to a calendar store like so:

ical4j integration receive | ical4j validator check | ical4j connector add --collection=Orders

It is also easy to integrate with other tools, such a JQ for extracting information:

ical4j connector get --uid 1234 | ical4j serializer serialize | jq '.attendee'

Examples

The following examples demonstrate how you might use iCal4j services to enhance an application or service.

Validate (and sanitise) incoming iCalendar data

The issue of calendar spam and other embedded nasties is becoming more of a concern for iCalendar data. The iCal4j Validator can potentially be used to screen incoming data not only for RFC compliance but also against unwanted or blacklisted content.

Generate Atom feeds from published iCalendar data

Using the iCal4j Serializer you can easily transform iCalendar data to Atom feed data, including expansion of recurring events.

Publish free/busy information for published iCalendar data

You may have a need for the iCal4j FreeBusy service to generate free/busy data from resource calendars to assist with scheduling.

Query iCalendar data using filter expressions

iCal4j includes support for a filter expression language that may be used to extract information from iCalendar object data using the iCal4j Query service.

Process iCalendar iTIP for scheduling

The iTIP specification defines how to coordinate iCalendar data between multiple calendar user agents (CUAs), and the iCal4j User Agent simplifies the processing of this data.

Send and receive iCalendar data asynchronously

TBD.

Manage iCalendar data with CalDAV

TBD.