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PHPBuilder.com - Using PHP to Make Basic vCalendar/iCalendar Events

The vCalendar and iCalendar specifications are designed for platform and device neutral sharing of calendar and to-do items. Since its inception, the vCalendar specification has quietly gained ubiquitous support in software applications and spawned its successor, the iCalendar format. Most of the popular calendaring programs such as Outlook, Palm Desktop, and LotusNotes support one or both formats. Recently, iCalendar gained a big endorsement by being used to power Apple’s iCal program.

vCalendar has been around longer and enjoys wider adoption. Most software calendaring programs (iCal, Outlook 2000+ for Windows) support both vCalendar and iCalendar, some (Palm Desktop, Outlook 97) support only vCalendar, and a handful (Outlook and Entourage for Macintosh) support only iCalendar. Most of your WAP calendaring applications also support vCalendar.

On the other hand, iCalendar is the format of the future. The Outlook products have picked up iCalendar support and so will the next version of LotusNotes. Apache has default support for iCalendar enabled, but not vCalendar. If you’re developing for vCalendar now, be aware of iCalendar.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2003 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Edit this entry.