CosmoCardDav - CardDav support in Cosmo

Author:	Vinubalaji Gopal (Vinu)

Introduction

CardDav in Cosmo

• Mentor: Brian Moseley and the Cosmo team
• Cosmo - Is a calendar, file server and will also become an address book server
• CardDav is a protocol to store, retreive, query and sync vcard information with a server
• CardDav - vCard Extensions to WebDav is based on CalDav

Problem

CardDav Protocol details

• MKADBK support
• Creating vCard Object Resources
• Address Book Reports
  • adbk-query
  • adbk-multi-get

Solution

The implementation strategy was to:

• Use VCard4j for parsing and storing the vcard
• Implement CardDav features based on the CalDav implementation
• Understand and implement storage in Jackrabbit - the Java Content Repository
• Use Cadaver, curl and the httptest to test the implementation

VCARD Example

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
FN:Brian Moseley
N:Moseley;Brian;;;
X-EVOLUTION-FILE-AS:Moseley\, Brian
EMAIL;TYPE=OTHER:bcm@nospam-osafoundation.org
UID:pas-id-44931D9800000000
REV:2006-06-16T21:07:36Z
END:VCARD

MKADBK Request in Cosmo

prompt> curl -X MKADBK -u test1:test1 -v -H 'Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8"'
-d @mkadbk.xml http://localhost:8080/cosmo/home/test1/testadbk
* About to connect() to localhost port 8080
*   Trying 127.0.0.1... connected
* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 8080
* Server auth using Basic with user 'test1'
> MKADBK /cosmo/home/test1/testadbk HTTP/1.1
...
< HTTP/1.1 201 Created
< Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
< X-Cosmo-Version: 0.5-SNAPSHOT
< Content-Length: 0
< Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2006 19:44:58 GMT
* Connection #0 to host localhost left intact
* Closing connection #0

Repository view

/t/te/test1
/t/te/test1/cosmo:email = vinu@nospam-osafoundation.org
/t/te/test1/cosmo:dateCreated = 2006-08-04T12:44:00.994-07:00
.
.
/t/te/test1/testadbk/adbk:language = en
/t/te/test1/testadbk/dav:created = 2006-08-04T12:44:58.447-07:00
/t/te/test1/testadbk/dav:displayName = testadbk
/t/te/test1/testadbk/dav:lastModified = 2006-08-04T12:44:58.447-07:00
/t/te/test1/testadbk/jcr:primaryType = dav:collection
/t/te/test1/testadbk/jcr:mixinTypes = adbk:collection
/t/te/test1/testadbk/jcr:mixinTypes = ticket:ticketable
/t/te/test1/testadbk/dav:displayname = Lisa's Address Book
/t/te/test1/testadbk/adbk:description = My primary address book.

How to PUT a vCard Resource

• Once an address book collection is created, we can start storing vcard's using the PUT command.
• It looks like a ordinary PUT command, but in Cosmo the vcard is parsed at this stage
• The parsed values are stored as key value pairs in the content repository and are used for reports
• Each vCard resource must have a UID type and its value should be unique.

Demo

What's left to be done

Here's a short plan of what I intend to complete before leaving

• Query Report support
• Multiget Report support
• Conform to the latest spec once it is released

What I learned

Interesting lessons I'll take away from this experience:

• Happy to contribute quality code to a open source software and to be part of the community
• Got the oppurtunity to implement the CardDav draft
• Understood JackRabbit and JCR 170 - a different approach to store data
• Learnt to use wiki
• and more..

More Info

• More Info here: CosmoCardDav
• Questions?