10 ms·
Zerocal – A Serverless Calendar App in Rust
- hoducha 4y agoWhy do we need a vCalendar file generator? The output of your app is a vCalendar file which is then imported into a Calendar app either manually or through the integration of email and calendar services. So in the end, people still have to use a calendar app. It is much easier to create an event on a calendar app and send the invitation which is actually sending emails with a vCalendar file as an attachment. Besides that, most calendar apps allow exporting the event as a vCalendar file also.
- omn1 4y agoAuthor here, had a lot of fun building this as it's just ~100 lines of Rust code + some CSS/HTML. If someone is looking for a fun thing to contribute to during Hacktoberfest, the code is on Github: https://github.com/mre/zerocal https://github.com/mre/zerocal Will mainly use it for myself to send out event links to friends.
- yewenjie 4y agoCan it be self-hosted without relying on shuttle.rs? If yes, could you please update the readme with instructions?
- schemescape 4y agoFYI: the text on your blog post is cropped on my small screen (iPhone SE), and scrolling doesn’t even help, so its essentially unreadable.
- omn1 4y agoThanks for the info. I thought I fixed that lately [1]. I don't have an iPhone to test it with but I'll see what I can do. At least on the Chrome viewport emulator it looks fine to me... https://github.com/mre/endler.dev/commit/bc1187d290d153455b045155d5392def63e9831d https://github.com/mre/endler.dev/commit/bc1187d290d153455b0...
- schemescape 4y agoNot sure if it’s the problem, but MDN says Safari doesn’t support “overflow-wrap: anywhere”. I’d actually never heard of overflow-wrap :)
- clircle 4y agoI'm wondering if this or a similar tool could be hooked into emacs to make working with calendars in emacs a bit easier. I don't think there is a good way to send calendar invites to people from emacs (but happy to be wrong on this one).
- tuukkah 4y agoAs seen in the article, the invites are simple text files. (I haven't tried, but you might be able to create one with icalendar-export-region?) I think the more difficult part is sending an email that looks and works right with the invite attached in a way compatible with the receiving systems. Invitations from Microsoft systems are especially horrible as they look like normal, plain text messages (without an invite) in standards-compliant systems. Depending how the sender expresses themselves, the receiver might have no clue they were invited let alone the time and place.
- tuukkah 4y agoI seem to have missed the author's point which is to craft the link and send the link to others to download. This way, it doesn't matter whatsoever what software is used.
- tuukkah 4y ago> I wanted a way to create calendar entries from my terminal. > There is no state on the server, it just generates a calendar event on the fly and returns it. Didn't see that coming. I suppose it's handy that you can call it anywhere curl is installed (or even use the browser address bar as your command line) instead of having to install and run the Rust program locally.
- tuukkah 4y agoI seem to have missed the author's point which is to craft the link and send the link to others to download.
- belkarx 4y agoThe process for making webapps in Rust seems extremely clean compared to other languages (or maybe I'm not exposed enough but I remember making things with Golang and even just JS was torture with common hosting solutions). Props to shuttle.rs and the Rust community!
- tomcam 4y ago> I remember making things with Golang… was torture with common hosting solutions) What made it difficult to deploy Go apps?
- belkarx 4y agoI did it around 2 years ago: the web solutions were not very mature and it was poorly supported (but that's my subjective experience)
- aliqot 4y agoWhat solutions were you using?
- chrisshroba 4y agoI’m also curious - could you maybe give an example of something concrete that is (or was) difficult in go but easy with rust?
- belkarx 4y agoI was using Heroku, but thinking back it may have been just a factor of inexperience (I don't do web much, not had I used Heroku before and the UX is not great there). I can't actually remember which go framework I used, but I associate negative feelings with the experience (take this entire thing with a grain of salt - I just thought shuttle.rs + the general rust buildsystem seemed so much cleaner than what I recall doing - I struggled a lot with config files and getting the module system to work for me)
- simlevesque 4y agoI beg you to keep GET requests idempotent. It's not that hard.
- fny 4y agoDon't be a party pooper. This is just RPC via HTTP. ;)
- ibotty 4y agoMaybe I am missing something, but which GET is not idempotent?
- 10000truths 4y agoThere’s no state maintained on the server, so all requests made to it are idempotent.
- spdustin 4y agoI want to make sure I understand this: You made a VCALENDAR generator with a web-accessible endpoint. It fills in the VCALENDAR with info passed in via URL parameters. And rather than returning a webpage, it just returns the VCALENDAR file. So you send your friends the link, they click it, rather then returning text/html content, it returns a downloadable response consisting of a pre-filled VCALENDAR file with the correct MIME type, and .ics extension. Do I have that right?
- omn1 4y agoThat's correct.
- EGreg 4y agoSorry but how is it serverless? Is it a static HTML file with JS that does the job? Isn't there a server that the request goes to?
- omn1 4y agoGood question. It depends on your definition of serverless. Strictly speaking there is no serverless, there's always some infrastructure somewhere. However the calendar file gets created out of thin air from the GET parameters alone. There is no state or storage involved. Other calendar apps have a backend with a DB; this one doesn't. Now whether that counts as truly serverless is up to you I guess. It's as close as you could get with a calendar I'd say. Not easy to get the point across in a title. ;) Hope that helps.
- jethro_tell 4y agoserverless is when you save the state but don't keep a machine sitting around when there are no requests, so you'd keep your calendar state in a hosted db and when someone asks for the calendar, a thread spins up and creates the calendar from the state and then disappears until there is another request. This is basically the exact opposite of serverless
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- longrod 4y agoLooks cool but...why not just send the .ics file directly via your IM of choice? Am I missing something here? I don't see the benefit if you still have to click, open file in your calendar, add it to the calendar. Can you tell me why the above wouldn't work and why this is better?
- omn1 4y agoYou could do that but you'd have to create the ics file manually and not every platform allows you to share ics files. My original use-case was Github. Wanted to share invites for https://github.com/hello-rust/community https://github.com/hello-rust/community. Github prevents sharing ics. Another thing is that people could edit a link in-place to e.g. update the time without creating a new file.
- jacob019 4y agoSpeaking of zerocal, have you ever noticed that low calorie packaged foods like pickles and cauliflower will put tiny serving sizes on the package so they can advertise 0 calories? I think they round down to zero when it's less than 5 calories.
- EmbeddedHash 4y agoYep. Another suspect of this is cooking oil spray, like Pam. They can advertise very low calories, usually 0, per serving but a serving is considered like 1/3 of a second spray.
- ComputerGuru 4y agoAnd it’s literally aerosolized oil, so definitely not a calorie-free food!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jonathankoren 4y agoGiven that this just creates an ics file, why bother with a server at all?
- tuukkah 4y agoApparently, to craft and send the link rather than the file.
- jonathankoren 4y agoI guess. It’s just so lazy. If you’re making a cli tool, why is it curl with a hand crafted url? At least have a custom executable or script bunch of options so you have checks against misspelling “description”.