Is the Google Calendar API appropriate for my problem?

Question

Hey all!

I'm currently working with a team on a project that will serve as a campus-wide event calendar for my school. We're designing it to be a web application using JSP having a java back end and connected to a relational database located on a server. The database will store events and produce a calendar on the web page based on the events.

Users will also be able to conduct searches and we would like to return a calendar based on the search results (such as activities occurring during a particular a time frame). Potentially we would be creating 100's of calendars at a time to accommodate multiple user requests.

We don't want users to need any special account to use the site (except maybe an account with us). The users will not be editing the events and changing anything but we want a nice GUI interface for them.

Is this a possible task to achieve using the Google Calendar API?

Just to clarify, we will be performing sql queries to construct a list of "events" in a separate section of our application. With this in mind, we do NOT want a calendar that queries our database on its own. We would like a API that allows us to input this list of events, and would output a calendar GUI that provides a user with access to multiple views (daily, weekly, monthly, etc) in an easy-to-use format.

thanks!

Answer 1

It sounds like a decent use of the Google Calendar API to me. After browsing through the API docs for Java, it looks like you can create a calendar, add whatever events to it you wish, and pass a link to that calendar back to the user. In fact, the API page I linked mentions that "you can generate a public calendar for Google Calendar to display, based on your organization's event database". This sounds like exactly like what you are wanting to do. Try out some of the sample code there and see if it looks like it will meet your needs.

Answer 2

Hi,

I totally agree with bta and have an additional idea:

You said:

The database will store events and produce a calendar on the web page based on the events.

You would benefit even more from using google calendar in this case. You wouldn't need a database to store the events which has many pros:

1. You would eliminate a possible bottleneck, because as you said there would be 100s of calendars generated at the same time,
2. You could have non-tech-savvy people to manage calendars (I believe google's interface is pretty simple, compared to the backend you would have to develop)
3. You would eliminate the need for backend (or at least the part responsible for event CRUDs)
4. You can always "wrap" google calendar using its API, so the gui would be completely up to you,

These are just some of my thoughts, because i believe that simple is better. I hope this will be helpful.

Good luck developing your app!

p.s. if you could, please tell us which method you used and how its working :)