I want to talk about a different kind of calendar. The really hard one to write : calendars for displaying events in jquery.

The pretty jquery-week-calendar

Written by Rob Monie, this is the first one I tried. I was amazed about how easy it was to integrate with the current development of Timmy (you can see an early beta when you’re logged here). You can take a look at the demo. Unfortunately, I had unexplicable bugs and I didn’t take the time to understand them. Please, don’t do like me and participate to the code on GitHub.

• Looks good
• Easy to integrate
• May be buggy when drag-dropping/resizing

The robust fullcalendar

We switched to this calendar, written by Adam Shaw, because it had three different views (month, week, day) and because we had some problem with the other calendar. It doesn’t look as good as the week-calendar (demo). You can also participate on GitHub.

• The default look is OK
• Harder to work with
• Display may seem slow (on firefox)
• More robust than week-calendar

Finally

These guys have made a great job doing something really hard. Just think about two overlapping events or when an event is two minutes long or hundreds of special cases that could happen. Kudos to them for giving their time and talent to us.

A word about git

Our team (me and Frank, the RubyFleebie guy) worked with SVN for a couple of years until Git stole the spotlight. For a couple of months, we worked with it and enjoyed it. Until we had to do “more advanced” things (branching, merging which is pretty basic to my sense) and things got incredibly hard. We switched to Mercurial a couple weeks ago which feels more like the perfect mix between SVN and Git. So if, like us, you feel puzzled by Git, give Mercurial a chance.