Syndication
iCalendars are becoming a very useful collaboration tool, and an ever-increasing method to share event information, free/busy time, and more. If you're interested in an easy way to publish your own iCalendars to the Internet, check out these great "How To" entries in Jon Udell's blog:
- Outlook 2007 instructions
- Google Calendar instructions
- Apple iCal instructions
- Windows Live Calendar instructions
The Initiative
This site is dedicated to helping those creating their own iCalendars or iCalendar feeds to ensure their calendars will work with other systems. It also serves as a meeting place for those developing validation tools to collaborate and ensure the validation is as accurate and useful as possible.
Why Validate?
Validating your iCalendar feeds before they are deployed ensures that they will be compatible with other iCalendar systems.
Validation Tools
A new iCalendar validator is available, based on Doug Day's DDay.iCal library. Check it out here.
Steven N. Severinghaus has also created an online iCalendar validator based on Ben Fortuna's iCal4J project. Check it out here.
Development Tools
For those wanting to develop a customized iCalendar feed, there are multiple free1 libraries available for development:
| Language | Library |
|---|---|
| C/C++ | libical |
| C# | DDay.iCal |
| Java | iCal4J |
| Python | iCalendar.py |
| Python | vObject |
| Ruby | iCalendar |
| Ruby | RiCal |
There are countless other commercialized implementations on the market as well, but considering the variety of free implementations, I've omitted their commercial conterparts.
Related Discussions
This metafeed currently gathers items tagged icalvalid from del.icio.us, Technorati, Twitter, and WordPress. The idea is to gather as much related discussion and info as possible without requiring all contributors to the discussion to join and contribute directly to this wiki.
XML Format
See the current icalvalid schema page.
Examples from the wild
See the Examples from the wild page.
