Continuing Calendar Domination
As part of my ongoing effort to subsume all Calendar activity in the Perl world I knocked up a Perl interface to Google's new calendar api.
It wasn't too painful - a coupld of things bit me on the arse. Trying to beat XML::Atom into doing the namespaces how I wanted was a bit painful and the return error codes from Google's RESTful API are less than helpful. Two examples ...
When first trying to add an entry it kept returning 200 OK rather than 201 Entry Added which confused the hell out of me. Eventually I figured out that it was because of their slightly odd session system. You first POST to their servers and get a 302 Temporarily Moved with a new session id in the headers. You're then supposed to redirect to that.
I mistakenly thought that LWP::UserAgent would do that for me but it appears it wasn't keeping all the necessary data around and so the add was failing. But failing with a success code (just not the right one). I'm sure there's a good reason as to why it does that but ...
So I got that working with some copy and pasted XML and tried to create my own XML using XML::Simple (I'd given up on XML::Atom::Entry temporarily). Entries were being created but they didn't have any of my data in. More head scratching and more cups of tea and I realised that I was using > rather than > tags. So why was it accepting it? Why was it not throwing a 500 error or whatever like I'd seen it do before? And for that matter why not some more debug information in the reponse body? *seethe*
So I had everything working in a hacky sort of way and decided to move everything over to nice, sane Net::Google::Calendar::Entry objects which were sub-classes of XML::Atom::Entry. All seemed to be going well - add, list and delete all worked fine. But update started to get a 404 Not Found. WTF?
First I checked my update code but that hadn't changed since it worked (and checking out a previous revision confirmed that). Eventually I realised that I hadn't yet put any start and end times in. Adding them in made everything work again. Graaagaah! Why let me add (and provide a default start and end time) and delete but not update? And why a fricking 404 Not Found? HOW IS THAT HELPFUL? HULK SMASH!
One thing I hated about the API was this whole magic url AND username and password AND session-id hoop jumping dance. It's not quite as bad as the insane Flickr authetication dance and the API does appear to at least be better in general than that particular monstrosity but I'm beginning to wonder if all Web Services APIs suck by nature rather than bad implementation.
Still, it all seems to be working now - a _devel version is up on CPAN and I'll add some more functionality later (like recurring events, OH JOY! > >)