Just enabled DAV on my laptop to play with iCal publishing.
Did some packet captures, and it appears that when iCal publishes, all it does is issue a PUT for the base URL plus the calendar name with a .ics extension, using Basic auth for the authentication (if needed). So, for example, if you say your publishing location is http://www.example.edu/cal and your calendar is named “test”, iCal will issue a “PUT /cal/test.ics HTTP/1.1” followed by the headers and then the entire calendar. It will send the entire calendar for each publish (even if the calendar is set to publish after each modification).
All of this bodes pretty well for an iCal to WCAP publish script. We don’t really need to implement a full DAV protocol — all we need to do is have a script that answers to a PUT request, does Basic auth, and then does the right thing with the filename and the user given to upload the file to the Sun ONE calendar. Looks like the appropriate WCAP command is import, which is a POST of the text/calendar file that the script will have received from iCal. This all looks quite doable.
Posted by Rowan Littell at October 11, 2004 02:41 PM