WebDAV Push support

[ArnyminerZ]

Hey everyone,

I'm from the bitfire team (developers of DAVx⁵), and we’ve been working on a WebDAV Push proposal (see draft) for a long time, to move away from noisy polling and get closer to real-time sync.

It’s already live for Nextcloud as an extension, and of course supported by DAVx⁵. We think adding support to this library would be a huge win for the Python ecosystem.

Are you open to implementing this, or would you be interested in a PR?

Cheers!

[tobixen]

I don't think I have time to work on it this month, but a PR would be nice.

Have you looked into jmap?

[ArnyminerZ]

but a PR would be nice

I can take a look and see what I come up with

Have you looked into jmap?

We know about it, but don't think really brings anything new to the table... I mean, basically the problem it has right now is very very low adoption. And critical server providers such as Google or Microsoft I'm pretty sure will never provide support for it.

[tobixen]

We know about it, but don't think really brings anything new to the table...

I haven't played much with it yet (yes, the caldav library now has experimental hsupports jmap, but I didn't implement the support for that myself), my first impression is that it's a lot easier to implement support for jmap both on the server side and the client side.

IMHO CalDAV is not a very good nor very well thought-through standard., and the support seems to be declining. It seems to me that it has become quite normal to use alternative ways of distributing and synchronizing icalendar collections, like proprietary apps distributed by server and service providers. Perhaps the solution is to replace CalDAV with a better standard (I don't have any strong opinions on this, it's just a thought that has popped up recently).

I mean, basically the problem it has right now is very very low adoption. And critical server providers such as Google or Microsoft I'm pretty sure will never provide support for it.

Right, but the same could be said about WebDAV push - why bother implementing support for it when there is no adoption? :-)

[ArnyminerZ]

IMHO CalDAV is not a very good nor very well thought-through standard

I mean, it's clear that it's very old, and has a lot of patches and overlapping RFCs, but I think that it's hard to make something as robust as it. I also don't like XML at all, but for this case, I think it's the good option.

It's also true that the definitions are complex, and most of the times they are not correctly implemented (we have this problem continuously with DAVx⁵), but I think it's actually a very complex topic, so the standard also has to be complex and dense.

and the support seems to be declining

I wouldn't say so... Most server providers support it, and it's basically the other standard supported by big tech (other than REST APIs or private SDKs).

like proprietary apps distributed by server and service providers.

Yeah... And that's an issue, we really need to have open protocols, or we will lose our digital sovereignty. If all servers implement their own protocols, it can get messy quickly.

And of course, I don't mean only CalDAV/CardDAV, but also all the other standards out there (including jmap maybe).

Perhaps the solution is to replace CalDAV with a better standard

It has been tried and it's... hard, and complex. On the surface it seems simple enough, but there are very specific and complex setups out there that squeeze CalDAV to its maximum.

Right, but the same could be said about WebDAV push - why bother implementing support for it when there is no adoption? :-)

Yeah... I guess so. But in this case, I'd say WebDAV Push solves a problem that has not been resolved yet, where jmap tries to improve and replace an already existing and working standard.