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The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (“CalConnect”) is a global non-profit organization with the aim to facilitate interoperability of technologies across user-centric systems and applications.
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This document was prepared by Technical Committee IOPTEST.
The interoperability test event at CalConnect XXIX, hosted by Mozilla, San Francisco, California took place on Monday February 3 through Wednesday morning February 5.
There were 11 members participating onsite represented by 20 individuals; two members participated remotely. Participating were:
AOL — CalDAV Scheduling
Apple — iCloud, iCal Client, Calendar Server
BusyMac — remote testing
CMU — CalDav Scheduling, timezone service, jCal/xCal, test suite (load testing)
Marten Gajda — remote testing — sync-collection CalDAV & CardDAV, managed attachments, PUSH notification
Milton.io — general testing, CardDAV with clients
Mozilla — Firefox OS/CalDAV
Oracle — CalDAV Scheduling, iMIP, CardDAV
Ribose — CalDAV access and scheduling, CalDAV sharing, CalDAV Tester
RPI — VPOLL — test suite — sharing and notifications
Softly Software — Basic CalDAV and iCalendar
University of Wisconsin — mostly observing
Yahoo! — CardDAV, CalDAV
As usual there was a lot of testing of basic CalDAV features. Some client applications are developing CalDAV support and there are some newer server implementations that need to test.
As we did at the last event we had a session led by Cyrus Daboo describing the CalDAV test suite and updates he had recently made to address some issues raised. Newer issues are related to using the test suite in an automated test environment and defining a subset of the tests which check the basic functions of CalDAV and CalDAV scheduling. The full test suite checks out many obscure issues, often related to recurrences. The session helped get some of the server implementors successfully running the test suite. It is expected that we will do more work on developing this suite during the next event.
There was some more testing of the timezone server specification which has had some minor updates since the last interoperability test event. This resulted in some further changes to the specification. A new feature of the specification is the ability to request and deliver truncated timezone specifications, allowing for much smaller sets of data to be transferred. There was some testing of this feature and some minor fixes resulted.
There was some further testing of the new JSON jCal and JCard specifications and some parsing problems were resolved — mostly in recurrence rules.
Some of the client developers tested some of the more awkward calendar issues such as uploads of medium to large sets of data which revealed problems in a number of server implementations.
The tests revealed many issues relating to the parsing and delivering of iCalendar data which are difficult to spot in production systems, such as:
Incorrect escaping of GEO values causing server exceptions
Clients generating invalid end dates and server not handling them correctly
Events with attendees but no ORGANIZER
Failures during calendar creation due to unsupported properties
The testing and resulting fixes generally result in more robust systems that react better to invalid data being presented — as well as, we hope, less invalid data.
Some of the new clients were able to test against a range of the servers available and reassure themselves that the clients were able to deal with most of the basic CalDAV features.
Mike Douglass, CalConnect Interoperability Test Manager