Calendars are a part of many kinds of applications. Often, they are an afterthought put into an application to display data in a single view, but they can be much more than that. We can leverage the work of RFCs and standards bodies who have already worked through many of these issues to define our data structures. Then we can look creatively at how to display that information and what tools are available.

We’ll look at an architecture that combines different objects to create a bag of tools you can use. This provides multiple views of data to clients and their customers, passing data back and forth between internal and external applications. We will do this by showing how Theatre Manager uses oCal as a replacement calendar external, the oGantt external (both from Brainy Data), externals we have built, and applications users already have available, to provide data to users of Theatre Manager, and to those inside and outside the organization through their iCal or Outlook calendars.

Attendees will receive copies of the externals we have developed for reading and creating industry standard ICS files and communicating with a CalDAV server, and demo versions and sample libraries for externals developed by others.

•What you’ll learn:

•How to combine multiple kinds of data into a calendar

•How to use PostgreSQL features to simplify overlapping date problems and finding birthday-like dates while leveraging the performance of a backend SQL database

•How to view the same calendar in a variety of different ways, such as by room, by person, by resources, by event

•How to assign a hierarchical order upon calendar items in a Gantt format

•How to send out calendar invitations to anyone using standard ICS format

•How to receive calendar confirmations back from anyone and integrate it into your data

•How to allow anyone to view calendars you have created via CalDAV or publishing a calendar

•How to go about resolving calendar conflicts

•Things to consider in notifying internal and externals users of events and changes

You can no longer use just a single technology. Omnis is great, but there are situations where other technologies may be more appropriate. I’ll give an overview of many of those Internet technologies and how you can use them side-by-side with Omnis

We’ll look at how HTML and CSS work as the glue holding many of these together in the browser to create mashup applications that may combine information from many different sources. Some of these will include Python, responsive web design techniques, HTTP, fire-and-forget, background techniques, Email, iCalendar, JSON, XML, KML, and ReSTful architecture.

We’ll also look at using technologies like social media and search engine optimization to engage existing customers and help you find new customers.

It’s a brave new world out there, and even old geezers like me need to keep up with new technologies and trends so we can keep ahead of the curve instead of being left in the dust.