Headless Calendar Creation
From our perspective, we had only one choice in our migration to the Cloud. We had to scrap the migration of the old technology stack and start over using a VUE Front End (FE) and AWS catalog Back End (BE). So, Step 1 began with burning down the ship. All the technical debt was gone. We shut down all web operations for the application, including the hosting agreements saving us $15,000 a year for Development and Testing. It felt excellent.
We thought step 2 was to create a standard login and password to get the user into a GUI for Calendar event creation. The more complicated piece as we dug back into creating a calendar invitation, was how to do state management for the customer to change, update the event if needed. Why would we want to compete with a Google Calendar client, Apple Calendar client, or an Outlook Calendar client? Especially when it came to designing a calendar client for Laptops and Mobile phones, both Web and Fat Clients.
We began to configuring the Simple Email Service or SES when we stumbled on the idea of sending a copy of the calendar invite to an S3 bucket off of one of our Calendar clients? Would SES and S3 work? Could that start our pipeline?
From S3 maybe we could run an Extract – Transform and Load (ETL), on it and load it into DynamoDB?
At some point in the build, we were going to need a DB. Why not just use the native calendar client for creating events and skip building a calendar client?
After some testing, we got to see the files show up in the S3 buckets. Of course, all Calendar clients create calendar data a bit differently. So tested Apple, Microsoft, and Android desktop and Mobile calendar clients and worked on a solution to transform the data using Extended Regular Expressions.
So, we incorporated ERE’s into our messaging workflow and decoupled that from all the rest of the workflow so that we can update when the various clients when needed. Believe it or not, Google, Apple, and Microsoft make yearly changes to how they generate and transport Ical files and calendar receipts.
So, what does CREATE a calendar invite mean if you’re an OEM? Well, Lots of good things. I have recapped below. Essentially it means if you purchase the solution, it will be headless calendar creation for calendar invites.
• Time to market. Like in less than one day. Faster adoption, since your customers can create the event on their mobile devices and view reporting all without an application, you have to maintain.
•You won’t have to deploy a client. We have built the VUE templates you can brand that we are using for the current workflow of calendersnack.com. We can share with you how we made calendarsnack.com and show API integration for single events and multiple event tracking.
•You can provide Calendar domains for your customers as an option opening up another RSVP service for brands