CardDav in Cosmo

vCard (RFC 2426) is a format to store and retreive address book information in a client. An example of a vcard from my address book entry in evolution is shown below:

BEGIN:VCARD
 VERSION:3.0
 FN:Brian Moseley
 N:Moseley;Brian;;;
X-EVOLUTION-FILE-AS:Moseley\, Brian
 EMAIL;TYPE=OTHER:bcm at osafoundation dot org 
UID:pas-id-44931D9800000000
 REV:2006-06-16T21:07:36Z
 END:VCARD

Many standard client's use or support vCard for address book and exchanging vCard information with a server will be a value added feature. CardDav or vCard extensions to WebDAV is a draft which describes exchange of vCard information using WebDAV. Compliance with the CardDAV spec is planned for Cosmo and any deviations from the CalDAV spec will be documented in this page.

The following features are planned for Cosmo and is a MUST for any CardDAV server.

• WebDAV Class 1 andClass 2 Class 2 (without locking) support - Implemented by JackRabbit and extensions by Cosmo
• WebDAV ACL's support (RFC 3744)
• SSL Support
• ETags support
• MKADBK support
• Creating vCard Object Resources
• Address Book Reports
  • adbk-query
  • adbk-multi-get

Unsupported Optional features:

• WebDAVDeltaV support (RFC 3253)
• adbk-sync Report

Design Considerations:

• Address book collection can be created while adding the user or through the MKADBK request. Cosmo will not create any address book while creating the user.
• Used vCard4j for parsing the vCards. vcard4j uses a DOM to store it parsed data and doing XPath query to traverse the DOM may be a performance issue. May replace it with a custom parser if performance is a real issue.
• AdBk Collection is a subset of Calendar Collection. It is possible to have a base collection class which extendsCalendarCollectionResource and have the common methods used byCalendarCollectionResource andAdBkCollectionResource - Cosmo will not have such a base class since the existing design need not be changed.

Implementation

• CosmoCardDavImplementation describe the implementation based on the old JackRabbit model.
• A new implementation based on the new Hibernate model is being worked upon and I will announce it here soon.

Source Download

• You can checkout the source from my svn sandbox.
• The source is based on the old JackRabbit based Cosmo (0.4ish).

svn export http://svn.osafoundation.org/sandbox/vinu/cosmo

If you want to make this cosmo run, you should follow CosmoBuildInstructions and use this Cosmo source instead of the default Cosmo.

Known Issues

• Atom Feed is not supported
• In Cosmo repository browser, while browsing a address book - the vcard type is shown as file, but it should be shown as an address.

External Links:

• S5 Slides of the intern presentation held on 10th August 2006 (at OSAF) - HTML , ReST
• vCard RFC 2426
• CardDav draft