alt Hacker NewsI've been playing with a toy app that dabbles in the Cal/CardDAV space, and it blows my mind that for all the power latest generation languages have, the thing I keep coming back to is PHP-based Sabre/DAV. That's not to say PHP isn't modern now, but instead a reflection of my surprise that there doesn't appear to be any other library out there that does as good or nearly as good a job at DAV as that one, and that one is pretty darn old.
On a different point, I don't think the author's point about having to "also" inspect the headers is a fair critique of DAV - HTTP headers are to indicate a certain portion of the request/response, and the body a different one. I wish it was simpler, but I think it's an acceptable round peg in a round hole use of the tools.
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I wrote a standalone CardDAV server ages ago and the biggest frustration for me was just how buggy the clients were. At some point I stopped self-hosting and moved on.
Author here, I'd be more inclined to agree about the headers if they were consistent. For instance, why is only Allow and DAV part of the header (and all of their bizarre options) and not things like supported report set or privileges? It would be better to have all of this in the body somehow, especially Depth.