Disclaimer: i’ve been living under a rock for the last few months so this is probably old news to you die hard web2.0 geeks out there.

Google has a protocol, and an API to follow, that allows the coding user to access certain data from Google sites. Since that was pretty vague, let me concretisize. Half a year ago, i moaned that while the Google Calendar is nice and nifty, and above all, porable (as long as you are on-line), if can olny serve data to your own personal calendar (in my case Kontact), not receive data from another source unless that source is a web browser. The serving part is done so that GCal exposes an iCal file over a http address with an obfuscated “magic cookie” bit in the URL.
Later, i realized that GCal does accept updates as iCal files, so i grabbed a script that exports my Outlook calendar into that format from the command line.  There was a bug somewhere, probably at Google, so now my sister in law has a birthday each Friday (happy Birthday, Leena, again!) along with a bunch of other yearly events that recur each weekend’s start.  Oh yes, and i can’t delete them either.

Anyways, to the point, because there is one.  Google has this protocol that allows the enlightened coder to fetch and update calendar data. Now all that is needed is that some (yes, enlightened coder) writes a resource plugin for the Google Calender data type, and we’ll finally have two way communication between Kontact and GCal.  Hallelujah. That would be so cool. So very cool.

And then, some other englightened coder would write a similar plugin for Outlook and one for those damn Nokia phones (ah yes, they use SyncML but i vaguely remember that SyncML is just another XML, like the GData format) and hey presto, we’ll all be living in a better world.  One wonderful interoperating world.  I can’t wait.

Outlook supports external calendars and plugins, right?