'DeSCal' in a nutshell
It is a shared calendar application which can be used by a group of persons to share their calendar events with each other. It is decentralized i.e. there is no need of a central server to be up and running all the time. This feature of DeSCal makes it suitable to use it in P2P or dynamic Ad-Hoc groups. It is different from centralized shared calendar applications like Google Calendar where a constant connection to a server is necessary. This enables DeSCal to form a group locally in an organization to share calendar events without a need of third party; henceforth, making it self-configurable.
DeSCal's objectives
DeSCal aims to provide users a decentralized infrastructure to share their calendar events with other users in peer-to-peer and dynamic ad-hoc networks. The motivation behind this application lies in the fact that DeSCal doesn't need any third party to manage and run it. Moreover, users should be able to join/leave the application at any point of time during the application runtime. It must be as responsive as a personal calendar, so, it keeps a local copy of the calendar at each participating site. The challenges to develop such an application are 1) to handle the concurrent operations on shared calendar 2) and to provide a mechanism for access control on these calendar events; both in a decentralized fashion. Access control on the local copy of calendar at each user site is necessary to prevent unauthorized access by illegal users and that too, should be dynamic.
Features
- It allows users to form a group and share their events with selected users in the group to whom they want to.
- Users are able to change the access rights on their calendar events at any point of time after the creation of an event.
- The application is up and running if at least one user in the group is on-line.
- The user who creates an event is, by default, the administrator of that event.
Illustrations
A small demo of DeSCal's implementation on iPhone OS involving two users. This demo video mainly focuses on access control features of DeSCal. In future, we plan
to make another demo video involving large number of users to highlight high concurrency and consistency achieved by DeSCal.
