Ok, so I have a new service I am looking to put out based on some work I did recently.

I need to offer an event management suite as part of my total solution, and I am looking for a good api that would help me do the following:

- Allow multiple customers to add events to my database, which could be all day, reoccuring, or one-time.

- Own all of my customers data, and not upload it to any 3rd party as part of the process of using the calendar.

- Show the events as a monthly, weekly, or daily view

Has anyone ever used googles calendar api, and does it fit these requirements ...
Has anyone used another calendar "viewing" api that they would recommend.

11/24/2009 4:38:09 PM

Why not write your own api that accepts your parameters (event name, dates, etc etc) this sounds super simple to do...the user can use it in whatever front end they want.

11/24/2009 4:44:16 PM

Yeah, my thought is to keep the backend of their data open via an API ... but to give them a default front end, such as google calendar, which would interact with my API, and they could embed it into their organizations websites as well.

11/24/2009 4:53:41 PM

by 'back end of their data' you mean their data in your database?

What I'm saying you could do is provide a url like http://www.yourdomain.com/api/addevent

and that url would accept parameters such as 'event name, start/end dates' etc...

so your URL would look like
http://www.yourdomain.com/api/addevent?name=Birthday&startDate=10-10-2009&endDate=10-10-2009

or depending on how you setup your urls it might look like

http://www.yourdomain.com/api/addevent/Birthday/10-10-2009/10-10-2009

and then your back end would parse this data and add it to the database. this allows the user to create their own front end and the ajax request or form action would be your url. You could also as you said create a default stand alone front end that they can embed on their site.

11/24/2009 4:59:05 PM

Ahh ... I see ...

Well, the users/customers would never be creating their own front ends, most likely.

The point of the solution would be to give them something they could use, like they would use google calendar ... but instead of google calendar owning the data, I would own the data, and would be able to integrate it into the rest of the solution that I am providing.

Its going to be a bit of an event management/marketing/publishing system, with several different front ends, such as on their own website, on facebook, on the iphone ... integrated with location/mapping information.

11/24/2009 5:04:03 PM

got it...it sounded at first that you wanted them to have the option to create their own front end. So just like something like Twitter provides an API so you can build your own twitter client.

but you more or less want to provide them with the front end client and the back end. I would call it a 'widget'

[Edited on November 24, 2009 at 5:06 PM. Reason : asdf]

11/24/2009 5:05:47 PM

Exactly ... and since I dont want to spend the gobbs of time it takes to create a slick calendaring front end, I want to be able to use someone else's calendar API as the frontend for my widget.

11/24/2009 5:10:10 PM