PHP CURL Google Calendar using Private URL

Question

I'm trying to get an array of events from Google Calendar using the Private URL. I read the Google API document but I want to try doing this without using the ZEND library since I have no idea what the eventual server file structure is and avoid having other people edit the codes.

I also did a search before posting and ran into the same condition where PHP CURL_EXEC returns false with the URL but I get a JSON file if the URL is open using a web browser. Since I'm using the Private URL, do I really need to authenticate against the Google server using ZEND? I'm trying to have PHP clean up the array before encoding it for Flash.

$URL = <string of the private URL from Google Calendar>
$ch = curl_init($URL);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$result = json_decode($data);

print '<pre>'.var_export($data,1).'</pre>';
Screen output >>> false

Answer 1

You can "roll your own" AuthSub or oAuth implementation:

The following is summarized from: http://code.google.com/apis/calendar/data/2.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#Auth

To acquire an AuthSub token for a given user, your application must redirect the user to the AuthSubRequest URL, which prompts them to log into their Google account. The AuthSubRequest URL might look like this:

https://www.google.com/accounts/AuthSubRequest?scope=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2fcalendar%2Ffeeds%2F&session=1&secure=0&next=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.coolcalendarsite.com%2Fwelcome.html

Then do this...

GET /accounts/AuthSubSessionToken HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Authorization: AuthSub token="yourAuthToken"
User-Agent: Java/1.5.0_06
Host: https://www.google.com
Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2
Connection: keep-alive

Then do this...

GET /calendar/feeds/default/private/full HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Authorization: AuthSub token="yourSessionToken"
User-Agent: Java/1.5.0_06
Host: www.google.com
Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2
Connection: keep-alive

More docs about AuthSub:

http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/AuthSub.html