Project Aries - DAV Services

This technology describes work being studied and developed at Sun Microsystems. While we currently intend the technology to become available to the Communications Suite community, we cannot guarantee precise schedules or delivery dates.

This FAQ provides information about the Project Aries--DAV services:

What Is Project Aries?

Project Aries is a code name for Sun's next generation Calendar Server, which is based on the new standard for calendar access called CalDAV. Beyond the first release, this technology will evolve into much more than a calendar server. Here are some of the higlights of this new emerging product.

• It is a standards based server that will provide Calendaring, Address Book and File Sharing Services over the DAV family of protocols (CalDAV), (CardDAV) and (WebDAV).
• It enables management of calendar appointments and scheduling. Calendars and address books are modeled as WebDAV collections. Events, tasks, and contacts are represented as WebDAV resources.
• It provides file storage and access, and access control management through WebDAV protocol and its extensions.
• The server would be tightly integrated with Sun supported clients, namely Convergence, Connector for Outlook, and Thunderbird Lightning.
• It would ship as part of Sun Java Communications Suite 7 and would integrate with existing components of Communications Suite as well as newer components like Project Miso.
• This server replaces the existing Sun Java System Calendar Server and would provide the features and functionality provided by the previous Calendar Server.

Why CalDAV?

The calendaring world has lacked standards until recently. Different vendor have used their own proprietary protocols in the past to interface between their clients and servers. Sun Java System Calendar Server uses its own proprietary WCAP protocol. CalDAV, which was approved as an IETF standard in March 2007, provides interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between all other servers and clients that conform to this standard. This includes servers like Apple's Darwin, OSAF's Cosmo, Oracle's next generation collaboration suite, and clients like Apple iCAL, Mozilla Lightning, Mozilla Sunbird, OSAF Chandler, Mulberry, Evolution and, in the future, Sun Convergence.

For Sun, supporting CalDAV in our Communications Suite provides our customers a wide spectrum of clients to choose from. It would also provide more flexibility for sync solution offerings including Notify/Syncronica.

When Will These Technologies Be Available?

The CalDAV Hosted Preview was deployed in Summer 2008 and is being updated every six to eight weeks. The product will be released as part of Communications Suite 7 and is currently targeted for Summer 2009. For more information, see Aries Hosted Preview Release Hightlights.

CardDAV and WebDAV support is intended to follow shortly after the initial release that would support CalDAV.

What is WebDAV?

WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning. This protocol allows users to collaboratively store, edit and manage files remotely. It provides a network protocol for creating interoperable, collaborative applications. Since WebDAV works over HTTP, you get all the benefits of HTTP, such as authentication, caching, and so on. Extensions to the WebDAV protocol define functions like access control, quota management, etc.

Why Are We Planning to Develop WebDAV?

CalDAV is an extension to WebDAV. So WebDAV is essentially the foundation of our solution. Moreover, a more generic storage server with a standard method of storing, retrieving, and querying provides a huge value add to Communications Suite's portfolio of services.

What Is CardDAV?

CardDAV is an extension of WebDAV designed to support Address Book. Address book is an integral part of Communications Suite, needed by Mail, Calendar and IM applications.

As with Calendar, for years no real standard has existed for accessing Address Book services. CardDAV does for vCards what CalDAV does for iCalendar. That is, it provides a set of WebDAV extensions and a data model for access to vCard objects stored on a server. vCard is the present standard for Address Book data representation. There is talk of rewriting vCard, and the CardDAV standard is not approved yet. But we would like to be ready!

I'm Interested! How Can I Find Out More Details?

Send us an email. caldav-interest@sun.com