Zimbra Calendar API - newbie questions

[saki]

Hi,
At our school, we are using Zimbra 5.0.11 as our email and calendaring system. We have a requirement to build a calendar UI on our web-site to publish public calendars on campus - possibly a Java (JSP) based web application. We would need to query the Zimbra calendar server and display events in a daily/weekly/monthly format - there are no updates or deletes.

I'm new to Zimbra and I'm exploring the possibility of using Zimbra calendar API for the same. I have a few newbie questions:

1. Which API should be used to query the Zimbra calendar - I see SOAP/XML and REST APIs mentioned on these forums - which is the appropriate/easier API to use for queries, assuming that the calendar UI is dynamic? Or can I just do an HTTP GET to grab a calendar in ICal format and process it?

2. Can the UI be implemented with zimlets? Are there any standard calendar objects/interfaces that I could use on our web page?

3. Can somebody provide any sample Java code that shows how to query the Zimbra calendar server and display events?

4. I would like to know how long it would take to implement a calendar UI with Zimbra API, for a newbie to Zimbra/SOAP/REST - is 2 months reasonable for an experienced Java web developer?

5. It would be great if somebody could point me to the right documentation to get started with the calendar API.

Any help/suggestions/pointers will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Shyam

[MacTI]

2 months is more than enough, I was able to make an Web service to exchange events and contacts between ZCS and a Web (JSP) app in 100 hours.

To fetch calendars, you have 3 options :

- SOAP, with the GetAppointmentRequest method
- Grabbing the calendar file (.ics) with a GET method
- Using CalDAV

I suggest going with CalDAV. Why? If you ever switch to another calendar system, or need to query Zimbra and another system, you will be able to switch without major code change.

[saki]

MacTI,
Thanks for your response. It seems like we are going to stick with Zimbra for a while - so, I would like to go for the easiest/fastest method to query the calendar server since we have some time constraints. I read that CalDav requires a server that supports "WebDAV Access Control Protocol" - does the Zimbra server support this protocol? Besides, CalDav appears to have a bigger learning curve.

We use Oracle Application Server (OC4J) for our J2EE web apps and I was wondering if using iCal with HTTP GET works best for us? Or is SOAP the better approach?

Do you have any sample code that you could share?

Any help/suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Shyam