WCAP is the calendaring protocol used by the Sun calendaring server. It can be used to connect OOo Glow to OGo.
Update (2004-09-12):
Development on Glow as part of OOoGW is discontinued by Sun.
The OpenOffice.org Groupware project is developing a calendaring client in
Java Swing, called
Glow.
Glow currently (v0.3beta) only supports the so called "WCAP" protocol
(Web Calendar Access Protocol?)
invented by Sun for its Sun calendaring server.
To give Glow access to calendars stored in OGo the OGo ZideStore server
was extended to support the relevant parts of the WCAP protocol.
PS: you should not mix up the WCAP protocol with the CAP
protocol, which is something different.
Update (2004-03-22):
Apparently Glow 0.3beta does not display appointments delivered by
ZideStore, its not clear whether this is a bug in Glow or ZideStore (eg delivering
broken output).
About ZideStore
ZideStore is the "native client integration server" of OGo. It is a middleware
server to map various HTTP based calendaring protocols (like WCAP, iCal-over-HTTP or Exchange WebDAV) to the OGo calendar/contact/task database.
To see how ZideStore fits into the OGo architecture, check out the
diagram.
Calendars
Currently we only support the private calendar ("Calendar") and the overview
calendar ("Overview"). Like with the WebDAV support OGo calendars are not
really physical files stored somewhere on the server, but map to queries
on the OGo appointment database.
In short: "Overview" contains all appointments which have the login account
as a participant while "Calendar" contains all appointments which are marked
"private".
To learn more about ZideStore internals check out the
ZideStore URL
page.
Configuration
To configure a server calendar in Glow, select the "Tools" menu and click
the "Configure Calendars" item. A calendar management dialog will come up.
Press the "New" button to configure a new calendar. The fields are:
| Field |
Description |
Example |
| Name |
any name you like |
My OGo Calendar |
| Protocol |
select WCAP |
WCAP |
| Server |
the hostname of your OGo server |
ogo.mycompany.com |
| Port |
the port ZideStore is running on |
23000 |
| User |
your OGo login |
donald |
| Password |
your OGo password |
xxx |
| Calendar |
one of the supported calendar, only "Calendar" and "Overview" in the moment |
Overview |
Plan
Since WCAP is not really a very nice calendaring protocol, the general strategy is to wait until Glow supports some other protocol, like the Exchange WebDAV
protocol, instead of extending/completing the WCAP support in ZideStore.
There was also work to write a plugin for OGo which uses the OGo XML-RPC
protocol to connect the server. We consider this also a dead end because this
protocol is OGo specific and should be replaced with some standard protocol
supported by Glow out of the box.
WCAP Issues
The biggest issue with WCAP is that it passes around the users credentials as plain text in the URLs. This should be resolved ASAP.
