There was a bunch of news coming out of the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), but in my opinion, the story with the lowest “press-coverage-to-significance” ratio is around Apple’s iCal Server. It turns out that the server itself is written in Python using the Twisted networking framework.
Yesterday, it was also announced that Apple officially joined CalConnect, the calendaring and scheduling consortium. The iCal Server supports CalDAV,
the up-and-coming standard for standards-based calendar and scheduling
over commodity web infrastructure. For more info on CalDAV, check out
this CalDAV article on NewsForge.
I find this interesting from three perspectives:
- SMB Market Expansion: Apple’s movement into the calendaring space will provide another viable alternative to Exchange, especially for new businesses. Before WWDC, the rumor mill was buzzing about Apple getting into the Voice-over-IP (VOIP) business. I think that this is the classic Apple play: Take a useful technology that works, package it in an elegant interface, make it easy to use, and then cast the problem so that people say “Why didn’t it always work this way”. An easy to use Calendaring and VOIP solution from Apple would be a game-changing moment.
- Ruby vs. Python: It puts some context around the announcement that Ruby on Rails will ship with Leopard
(OS X 10.5). The bundling of Rails is great news for everyone involved.
The Rails community is very much pro-Mac (all of the core commiters,
and the vast majority of Rails developers work on Macs (much to the
delight of Allan Odgaard, developer of the phenomenal TextMate text editor).
However, the fact that Apple is building new, high-profile applications using Python should indicate that Apple is not likely to be a one-trick pony when it comes to dynamic languages.
- Additional validation of Twisted: The fact that Apple is using Twisted as the foundation for something as strategically important as Calendaring should reinforce the well-deserved image and reputation of the Twisted team and the software that they produce. In time, this is certain to introduce Twisted to the greater IT industry, and make Twisted-based applications much more interesting to the broader market.
