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Comment by ses | Hacker News Reader

One of the problems with using a self-hosted alternative like this is the fact that Google open up a lot of their services through APIs which other applications then consume. A web app I wrote a couple of years ago is one example (meetingShed). This easy integration with other apps opens up a lot of possibilities, but is there an alternative with ownCloud? It would be really interesting to see if a solution could be developed to expose self-hosted services (dynamically located) through a publicly accessible API (statically located).

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As micampe points out in this thread, Google is shutting down their CalDAV API [0] in favor of their own proprietary one [1] OwnCloud supports the open WebDAV/CalDAV standard, as do several other self-hosted implementations [2].

[0]https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/caldav

[1]https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/

[2]http://caldav.calconnect.org/implementations/servers.html

The solution is trivial - just have some json in a specific format. The problem is getting everyone to agree on a standard and to get big players like Google, MS, Yahoo to use the standard.

To be honest though, there doesn't really seem to be much effort to even try - maybe someone famous will step forward and get the ball rolling?

Can't read the article right now, but for contacts and calendars we have standard public APIs: CardDAV and CalDAV. Too bad Google just discontinued the latter, weirdly enough just a few months after finally supporting the former.

Unless something has changed recently, there isn't much information about Google's CardDAV implementation. I had to find a reference on a mailing list for a CardDAV implementation to even figure out what Google's URL structure looked like.

I couldn't figure out a way to list all contact lists. You had to know the name of the list and use it in the URL. Even at that, you can only access contacts in "My Contacts" or other groups. There's (seemingly) no way to access "All Contacts".

CardDAV is 'supported,' but not very well. It's definitely a second-class citizen.

But I think this is exactly the point, no?

Google has an API now, but who knows if it'll be there tomorrow. Google does not have a great track record at this point.

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