If you’re building an application with calendar integration, it can be a difficult process to support all of them due to their various authentication methods and data models. One Calendar is an API which aims to simplify this by simplifying integration with commonly-used calendars such as Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange.
The API was birthed out of CEO Adam Bird’s frustration with being unable to easily interact with the myriad of existing calendar APIs which are available. One Calendar could be likened with ‘Stripe’ in its ability to support multiple services simply. Stripe is for payments, however, with any website or developer able to accept them in their applications with just a few lines of code.
One Calendar has a common data model as well as authentication and authorisation to make working with multiple calendars just as easy as Stripe is for payments. This means more focus can be placed on enhancing your application without having to worry about maintaining the various calendar integrations.
On the company’s website, they explain the motivation behind the One Calendar API: “Integrating with calendars is hard. Each platform has its own data models and authentication flows. We’ve had to solve these problems to deliver our service. Now we’re opening up our API to developers, making rich calendar integration possible for everyone.”
‘Webhooks’ allows One Calendar to send you notifications when events are created, updated, or tagged so your application can take action appropriately. It is worth noting that the feature is currently in beta but has a lot of potential for changing how web services interact with applications.
Currently the API is able to support Google Calendar, Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, and iCloud. More services will be added in the near future, with the priority being other popular services such as Outlook and Yahoo for personal calendars, and Sharepoint and Salesforce for the enterprise.
To access One Calendar you will require an invite which can be requested here.
Will you be using the One Calendar API to make working with calendars easier? Let us know in the comments.
