I think that core is the right audience to bring this up. As I was starting to work on a rails plugin to complement my ri_cal gem, I thought that a simple CalDav server might make a neat source app.
But that got me thinking about how CalDav fits into Rails in its current and future state. WebDav can be thought of as an extended http which adds a handful of new methods for manipulating resources and collections of resources. CalDav further extends WebDav with two calendar specific methods for creating and querying calendar resources. I don't want to get into a religious discussion about whether or not CalDav/WebDav is RESTful. FWIW Roy Fielding seems to think that although the extensions aren't really necessary, WebDav (and presumably CalDav) are more OK than some of the other things out there on the interwebs. Now in googling about, I discover that there's a railsdav plugin whose usage I don't entirely understand. One thing it does is to patch ActionController::AbstractRequest (or ActionController::Request in Rails 2.3) to add the webdav methods to the HTTP_METHODS constant. It's not clear whether this is enough to allow routes to use the new methods as condititions or not. It seems to me that this kind of patch is right where things are being changed for Rails 3. Would it be worthwhile to consider having an explicit extension API in rails 3 to add 'http' methods in such a way that both dispatching and routing takes the new methods into account? I also notice that there is a rackdav project which provides a rack middleware which understands webdav protocol. This appears to be written as an 'endpoint' middle ware, it doesnt seem to provide for passing through. This gave me that idea that another alternative to adding methods to rails might be to interpose a rack middleware which converted requests with webdav/caldav methods to requests with normal http methods, by either rewriting the uri in some defined fashion and/or adding parameters. But that seems less compatible with the Rails approach, I think I'd like to be able to route requests to different controllers/actions the same way I can do with normal http rest schemes. Thoughts? -- Rick DeNatale Blog: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale WWR: http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdenatale --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
