Kalends: Python calendaring API
===============================

Introduction
------------
Kalends is a Python module using the Component Architecture technologies of
interfaces and adapters to separate the storage and display of calendar events.
The purpose is to provide a generic Python API so that any calendar UI can
display calendars coming from any calendar source. Thus, one can create new UIs
without reimplementing the underlying calendar functionality, and one can
likewise implement specialized calendar functionality while reusing the
existing UI.

For example, if you have a groupware system with a good calendaring UI but need
to use an external server for your calendars, you should not need to rewrite
the user interface.

A secondary goal is also to provide an API for calendaring to help people
around some of the obstacles you will sooner or later arrive at, like how to
handle recurring events, searching, and more, by providing them with an API
that can handle the issues.

The two main concepts of this API are event providers, which are the sources of
events, and event users, which take the Events and display them, export them,
etc. More information on how to use Kalends to make an EventProvider is in
doc/PROVIDING.txt, and more information on how to use Kalends to get events
from an EventProvider is in doc/USING.txt.


Requirements
------------
Although the creation of Kalends was prompted by the desire to have one set of
advanced Kalendaring views available for all calendars in Plone, and although
the Component Architecture was created by Zope Corporation, Kalends is in no
way specific to Plone, Zope or even web applications. It's a Python module,
installable for any Python version (2.3 or later) on any system that can
install the Component Architecture, which is pretty much any Python system with
a C compiler.

Kalends requires:
- Python 2.3 or later (last version tested: 2.4.3)
- zope.interface 3.2 or later (last version tested: 3.2.2)


Known implementations
---------------------
Currently the Dateable (https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/dateable/)
module set is using Kalends. It contains chronos, a set of views for Zope that 
implements a Kalends UI, and Plone4ArtistCalendar, a Plone product that makes
Plone folders into event providers.