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Development choices and problem solutions for Milestone: c. Calendar (with external sync)

Throughout the development of the Calendar there have been many decisions done due to encountered problems or inconveniences.

  1. Datetimes and Timezones Working with Timezones and Time in general with JavaScript's Date is a very bad DX and is prone to errors. Due to this it has been chosen to use a new, emerging standard for working with dates and times – Temporal. Because it's still Stage 3, and not all web browsers support it already, Calendar uses polyfill to work with it.

    • Problems with Date:
      • Incosistencies:
        • Days are within range of 1–31,
        • Months are within range of 0–11
      • Missing functionality
        • Date cannot calculate days in given month, date ranges or time ranges
          • Doing all of these things with Date require hacks like negative days or relying on specific dates, which (as described earlier) is very error prone and hard to debug
        • Timezone conversion
    • Benefits of using Temporal
      • First party support of useful API's such as dayOfWeek, daysInMonth
      • Great support for timezones via Temporal.ZonedDateTime
      • Support for time ranges and durations
      • Strict options with checks and good errors

  2. For external synchronization Calendar implements importing and exporting of iCalendar (ics) format, which is a de facto standard for calendars. To parse calendars Calendar uses ical.js library.

    • Why ical.js:
      • Open source with GPLv3 compatible license (MPL-2.0)
      • Extensive support for iCalendar with compliance to RFC 5545
      • Actively maintained
      • Encountered issues:
        • ical.js uses its own ICAL.Time class, which requires switching between it and Temporal.ZonedDateTime at times
          • Not a big issue, we can convert between them pretty easily
          • Why not just use something that uses Temporal?
            • Because no package with support for iCalendar uses Temporal at the time of writing this

  3. Calendar uses SvelteKit for its web framework, which allows for easy and fast iteration on the app, has great to use state management using stores and contexts.

  4. Calendar adopts Material 3 Design for its graphical interface to integrate nicely on phones and give it that "native feel".

    • Because of that Calendar partially utilizes Material Web Components, webcomponent set for Material 3 made by Google