Whatever happened to...vCalendar and Reefknot?

hanenkamp has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I use Mac iCal to store my calendar and it has this handy export feature that lets me dump any calendar to a WebDAV enabled HTTP server. Great! Now I can use iCal to create events and then write a handy little Perl script to rip those suckers apart and generate content for my web page. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I search around on Google and CPAN for modules that already do all the work and what do I find? Almost nothing.

The best thing I am able to find is Reefknot, which hasn't had a CVS commit in over a year. The last release on CPAN dates back to 2001, except for a module which is capable of parsing ICal dates---useful, but not applicable to breaking up vCalendar files.

Looking around for solutions in other languages or even for applications reveals a dismal collection of hacks, almost working code, and abandoned projects. Is vCalendar complicated? Not really. Can anyone explain to me why vCalendar seems to be the third rail of programming? Every project that touched it seems to have died 2 or more years ago. Heck, I can't even find the word vCalendar more than once in SuperSearch. Anyone have insight?

Comment on Whatever happened to...vCalendar and Reefknot?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Whatever happened to...vCalendar and Reefknot? by mojotoad (Monsignor) on Jul 23, 2004 at 04:47 UTC
I'm really not sure what happened to development on Reefknot. However, there is active development in the DateTime project for a couple of modules that deal with ICal specifications: DateTime::Format::ICal DateTime::Event::ICal These modules provide at least part of the functionality, but do not come near to the scope of what Reefknot was aiming for. There are a lot of date/time/calendar dorks that hang out on the mailing list for DateTime (I'm one of them), so feel free to drop by and ask away. Matt	[reply]
Re: Whatever happened to...vCalendar and Reefknot? by davorg (Chancellor) on Jul 23, 2004 at 09:16 UTC
Reefknot died a while ago. The project that you should probably be looking at is Text::vFile::asData which takes vFiles (vCal, vCard, etc) and parses them into Perl data structures. Specialised files for the different types of vFile are promised for some unspecified time in the future. -- <http://www.dave.org.uk> "The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club." -- Chip Salzenberg	[reply]
Re: Whatever happened to...vCalendar and Reefknot? by ysth (Canon) on Jul 23, 2004 at 04:49 UTC
IMO iCalendar is just too durned complicated. I think real life overcame one or more of the driving force developers, and attention of others less interested in iCalendar per se was taken by the new DateTime project. There may be newer modules on the reefknot site than in CPAN.	[reply]
Re: Whatever happened to...vCalendar and Reefknot? by clscott (Friar) on Jul 23, 2004 at 19:44 UTC
Jay Lawrence built Text::vFile and Leo Lapworth wrote Text::vCard based on Jay's module. I know that Jay tracks time on his Mac with Calendar and uses Text::vFile to generate invoices for his time from the calendar files. -- Clayton	[reply]


XP is just a number
	PerlMonks