Spooky Pony 

Some Perspective

One of the wonderful things that comes from a few days spent doing other things is a certain amount of clarity and perspective that you get when you return to whatever-it-was. In this case, I've realized that the Event model is both too complex and too cool for school. In short, I should absolutely not build iCal functionality into the Event model. Instead, what we ought to do is extract this functionality into a different Django application.

To that end, I'm going to start building django-ical. The concept is similar to James Tauber's django-atompub, where django-ical requires you to define certain methods that allow it to provide the necessary data to build ICS files. Those methods will extract the data from whatever model you choose to provide to it. The ICS files will then be available for download from the site in which they are embedded.

My goal is to build a working CalDAV application for Django. Ambitious, yes, but... truth told, I've had a bug for years about the paucity of complete groupware stacks that are easy to use. A single CalDAV server implementation isn't really the groupware stack I've been dreaming of, but it might be a step in the right direction.

The point, though, for the django-meeting application, is that Event need not define any iCal related functionality. Instead, I need to make sure the necessary data exist for each Event, which means the proper field definitions. Then, write the necessary views and wire that up to django-ical. And, errrrr, actually write django-ical...

Again, more to come later.

This post is a continuation of my earlier entry on writing Django applications.