CalendarCruncher.com – This website provides a very rich online experience to create, manage, sync and share online calendars. This is a SaaS application. Multiple videos here
Challenges faced:
- The calendaring domain is quite mature – there are multiple standards [CalDAV, iCal - including a section for Recurring Events] and many implementations. To make things more complicated, each implementation differs from others in one way or another. CalendarCruncher masks these differences and creates a seamless experience for the user.
- The UI had to be almost completely Javascript driven – to create a user experience that is very similar to that of a native client such as Microsoft Outlook.
- The application allows the user to sync with Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook and Apple iCal – all from the same interface. Further the user is also allowed to change the external calendar they’ve synced their local calendar with – from say iCal to GCal. These features required us to build a platform that could talk to various calendaring systems using a common interface.
- The project uses a host of open source components. While each these represent the best software in their class, they’re written in different languages – including Ruby, Java, PHP and even C#. We took on the job of integrating these various components – while keeping the user experience seamless.
- One component that we did not have suitable open source options for – was the Outlook plugin that had to be shipped with CalendarCruncher. So we built the plugin from scratch using C#. This is full fledged client that does bi-directional syncing of your Outlook calendar with that in CalendarCruncher – using the CalDAV protocol.
Technologies Used: Ruby on Rails, JRuby, Java, Google Calendar API, C# .NET, DaviCal, Lucene, PHP, Glassfish, JQuery, Selenium, RSpec, Cucumber, CalDAV4J, RiCal