Practical Internet Groupware

GroupCal as a Web Component

Suppose we did outfit GroupCal with meeting and task objects. Since these things are more objectlike than relational, XML might be a good way to represent them. An XML-capable object database could serve up this data; XSL presentation services could render it in a browser; DHTML scripting could support interactive viewing and editing.

This is all very exciting but slightly ahead of the curve in terms of the installed base. Netscape is playing a catch-up game with XML; browser support for XSL is still experimental; the Microsoft and Netscape DHTML technologies are quite different. For the time being, web applications that manage complex data objects within a calendar framework rely on server-side production of HTML. This approach is time-honored (as Internet time goes, that is) but still really useful.

As we saw with the Microsoft Index Server (Chapter 8), one way to work with a software component that exports a web API is to treat it as a black box accessible only through that API. Anything that a user can do by way of a browser, a web-client script can do by manipulating URLs. This duality, inherent in all web software, can often enable startlingly simple solutions to seemingly hard problems.

Importing Data into GroupCal Using its Web API

When I first deployed GroupCal, a colleague asked if he could import data from his personal information manager (PIM) into GroupCal. My first response was: no way! But on reflection I saw that this was actually an ...