Full read/write access to Google Calendar

With the Social Network Bill of Rights movement championing full access to personal data stored on social networking sites, it is heartening to see major players like Google opening up the data silos.

Jun Yang at the Google Data APIs Blog and Dion Almaer at the Google Code Blog have announced GData JavaScript Client Library for Calendar, a new client-side Javascript library that allows two-way, authenticated access to Google Calendar events without server-side proxies.

What if you would like to write an Ajax client that can create, update, or delete entries as well as read it?

Now you can. This release allows you full read-write access to Google Calendar from JavaScript. Instead of requiring server-side proxies to do this for you, AuthSub is fully supported from within the pure JavaScript client.

-Dion Almaer (Google Developer Programs)

What this means is that any web application can read an event from Upcoming, let’s say, and (with your AuthSub authrorization), create a Google Calendar event for you. A little Javascript to read Upcoming’s REST API, a little jQuery drag-and-drop onto a Calendar AJAX object, and Wam Bam, you’ve dragged data from Yahoo and dropped it onto Google. All without any round trips to the originating server.

Think FaceBook applications. Then think about them interacting with one another — without them bogging down on some developer’s rented web host.

The library documentation has some interesting samples to get you started.

Dion Almaer interviewed Jun Yang explaining how the code uses nested iframes to “legally” perform cross-domain AJAX accesses. That video is below.