[Calendarserver-discuss] FBURL support in Lightning/Iceowl (was Re: Free Software calendaring and groupware (in and beyond Debian))

[Paul Boddie]

On Saturday 9. April 2016 15.59.28 Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Quoting Paul Boddie (2016-04-09 14:08:29)
> 
> > (Before I forget, and given that this is a "groupware weekend", I will
> > also try and dig up my Thunderbird/Lightning extension for reading
> > Web-based free/busy information and consulting the LDAP FBURL
> > attribute in order to know where to read such information from. It may
> > be of interest to the Icedove/Iceowl participants.)
> 
> Ohh, that would really be wonderful!
> 
> (especially, for my part, if those notes also reveal approaches usable
> without LDAP).

I've uploaded this work to the following location:

http://hgweb.boddie.org.uk/fburl

There's not much history in the repository, but quite a bit of work went into 
getting something working in the very beginning. Thunderbird development (as 
with the Mozilla things in general) isn't the easiest thing to get into, and 
it doesn't help that Mozilla's developer resources are confusing to say the 
least.

All this extension does is to consult any configured LDAP database, get any 
FBURL property for an identity, and then try and use the referenced resource 
to populate the free/busy dialogue where that identity appears. I first got 
this working by populating LDAP entries made for a Kolab installation and 
setting FBURL to the free/busy files that Kolab's daemon publishes 
periodically.

As I noted before, a nice thing to have would be the extraction of such 
information from vCard objects exchanged via e-mail (as opposed to anything 
retrieved via CardDAV). There are RFCs that formalise such things, so this 
isn't something I've just thought up for fun. ;-)

Anyway, I'll add documentation for this project in the next few days.

Paul