I've now released DAViCal 0.9.9, after five pretty intensive weeks of work. This includes a number of features that were implemented to support dotCal, which has now replaced their old Cosmo backend with DAViCal to break through a performance bottleneck. That turned into a six-week challenge, because Cosmo had wandered some distance from where calendaring standards are currently going, and so there was a lot of work under the covers of dotCal to switch from using various Cosmo-specific features to do the same thing, using open calendaring standards like CalDAV.

After a whole bunch of drastic changes, lots of bugfixes, rewriting and refactoring, I released DAViCal 0.9.8 on Christmas day last year. I didn't release it very publicly, because I knew it sucked significantly. In an increasingly fast turnaround I've subsequently released 0.9.8.1 to a somewhat wider audience while I was at the recent Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium meeting in Costa Mesa at the beginning of the month. Earlier this week I released 0.9.8.2 to the more interested of the DAViCal userbase. So finally, yesterday, I released DAViCal 0.9.8.3 to fix the few significant problems that were left with that, and this is the release that I'm telling everyone about, because I believe it should be a good stable platform to people who want to upgrade their production DAViCal servers, or who have been hanging back from using DAViCal until the platform was a little more stable.

I released a new 0.9.7.2 version of DAViCal yesterday. This reflects quite a lot of stability and small fixes for some subtle problems, and quite a lot of work with the iPhone, adding the possibility of a simpler configuration experience for iPhone users.

Several weeks ago I was browsing around CalConnect wondering, as you do, if the timing will ever be right and the backing available for me to visit one of their meetings. It seems that the planets may actually finally be in alignment and I am really hoping that I can get to CalConnect XVI from 5th to 9th of October - though I will have to save my pennies.

In passing I noticed that the FREEBUSY Technical Committee has just published a Proposal for Freebusy Read URL, defining a bunch of optional parameters that can be used in queries against a freebusy URL. As calendar servers increase in power and scope it seems natural that these things will become more useful even if you might have thought time had passed them by, replacing them with more advanced CalDAV scheduling extensions.

Since DAViCal has always had Freebusy URLs, and in fact accepted a couple of simple parameters in them already it turned out to be a simple matter to provide these standardised ones as well. This change was included in DAViCal 0.9.7 which I released quietly into the wild a few days ago.

After far too long (too many holidays away from my keyboard :-) I've released DAViCal 0.9.6.3 and AWL 0.36. This is mostly a stability release, fixing all those little niggles that might only affect a few corner cases, but it frees me up now to concentrate on adding more functionality for a 0.9.7 release in due course. Hopefully this will be the last in the 0.9.6.x series.

More information in the DAViCal release notes on the wiki.

There are quite a few changes to the AWL libraries which this release depends on, but most of those changes have been driven by my Work Request Management System and Capital APMS projects, rather than from DAViCal.

Well, it seems that there were few problems with the pre-release of DAViCal I pushed out last week, so 0.9.6 is out now.

The full release notes are on the wiki. The biggest change is that this release now supports free/busy using the method defined in the draft scheduling extensions for CalDAV, so it's possible to schedule meetings with Sunbird/Lightning or iCal, and possibly other clients if they support that.

Now I can concentrate on getting some paid work done for a few weeks before I start on the next stage.

Updated

After release I discovered that due to the changed behaviour of DAViCal, interoperation with Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning 0.8 was no longer working. A new 0.9.6.1 version has been released to resolve this issue.