in search of: basic web app for testing web-based protocol handling

[Dan Mosedale]

There is a bunch of product management work that needs to happen
over the coming weeks and months so that Firefox3 ends up with a
good set of default web-based protocol handlers. A wiki page has
already been started along those lines at [[Firefox3/
ContentManager:Handlers]]. However, we'd like to get real live
testing rolling before we get to the point of firming up exactly
what defaults we'll be shipping in Firefox 3. In particular, we're
hoping to be able to ship a pointer to at least one test protocol
handling service in M8 (currently scheduled to ship sometime after
September 5th and before September 19th).

To this end, ctalbert and I have been talking about the idea of
throwing together a very basic web-based protocol handler app which
we would offer to the public after M8 and until we get at least one
or more of the real defaults firmed up and shipped in a milestone.
The current suspicion is that the best candidate would be a webcal:
handler (as specified in http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/
current-work/#custom-handlers) which will fetch an ICS file and
render it to HTML. There are a sufficient number of webcal: links
scattered about the net that it seems likely that folks will
actually hit this in the course of using the alpha, and it should
be (we think) pretty easy to implement given existing (Perl | PHP |
Python | ...) library modules for ICS, calendars, HTTP, etc.
Another possibility would be to hack something like WebCalendar
<http://webcalendar.sourceforge.net/> to support the WhatWG API and
put up an instance of that.

Is anyone interested in helping make something like this come
together in pretty short order?

Dan

[Clint Talbert]

Dan Mosedale wrote:
>
> To this end, ctalbert and I have been talking about the idea of
> throwing together a very basic web-based protocol handler app which
> we would offer to the public after M8 and until we get at least one
> or more of the real defaults firmed up and shipped in a milestone.
> The current suspicion is that the best candidate would be a webcal:
> handler (as specified in http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/
> current-work/#custom-handlers) which will fetch an ICS file and
> render it to HTML. There are a sufficient number of webcal: links
> scattered about the net that it seems likely that folks will
> actually hit this in the course of using the alpha, and it should
> be (we think) pretty easy to implement given existing (Perl | PHP |
> Python | ...) library modules for ICS, calendars, HTTP, etc.
> Another possibility would be to hack something like WebCalendar
> <http://webcalendar.sourceforge.net/> to support the WhatWG API and
> put up an instance of that.

I think this can be done pretty simply. One idea I have is to create a
web service that builds an HTML page from the ICS data that will list
each event in the ICS file in a nice, easy to read fashion. We might
use something like the "event invitation" dialog from the Lightning
project [1] for inspiration.

Other thoughts? Does anyone have any feedback regarding various
advantages/disadvantages of ICS parsers in Perl, Python, or PHP?

Thanks for the help!

Clint (ctalbert)

[1] http://cmtalbert.googlepages.com/eventinvitation.png

[Dan Mosedale]

Clint Talbert wrote:
> One idea I have is to create a web service that builds an HTML page
> from the ICS data that will list each event in the ICS file in a
> nice, easy to read fashion. We might use something like the "event
> invitation" dialog from the Lightning project [1] for inspiration.

This seems like a fine plan to me.

> Other thoughts? Does anyone have any feedback regarding various
> advantages/disadvantages of ICS parsers in Perl, Python, or PHP?

Given that we're just looking for basic functionality testing, I'd
personally just go with whatever language/environment you're most
comfortable/productive with, as long as it has some sort of ICS parsing
capability.

Dan