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Zerocal – A Serverless Calendar App in Rust

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Re: Zerocal – A Serverless Calendar App in Rust

#51

Post by melony »

belkarx wrote: post #50
aliqot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What solutions were you using?

I was using Heroku, but thinking back it may have been just a factor of inexperience (I don't do web much, not had I used Heroku before and the UX is not great there). I can't actually remember which go framework I used, but I associate negative feelings with the experience (take this entire thing with a grain of salt - I just thought shuttle.rs + the general rust buildsystem seemed so much cleaner than what I recall…

We have come a long way since Heroku. Vercel/Zeit has really raised the bar and expectations for a modern PaaS.

Re: Zerocal – A Serverless Calendar App in Rust

#52

Post by rhn_mk1 »

omn1 wrote: post #25
EGreg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but how is it serverless? Is it a static HTML file with JS that does the job? Isn't there a server that the request goes to?

Good question. It depends on your definition of serverless. Strictly speaking there is no serverless, there's always some infrastructure somewhere. However the calendar file gets created out of thin air from the GET parameters alone. There is no state or storage involved. Other calendar apps have a backend with a DB; this one doesn't. Now whether that counts as truly serverless is up to you I guess. It's as close as…

Isn't it serverless when it's local-only? Or, in an extreme case, peer-to-peer?

Re: Zerocal – A Serverless Calendar App in Rust

#53

Post by ComputerGuru »

EmbeddedHash wrote: post #29
jacob019 wrote: post #20

Speaking of zerocal, have you ever noticed that low calorie packaged foods like pickles and cauliflower will put tiny serving sizes on the package so they can advertise 0 calories? I think they round down to zero when it's less than 5 calories.

Yep. Another suspect of this is cooking oil spray, like Pam. They can advertise very low calories, usually 0, per serving but a serving is considered like 1/3 of a second spray.

And it’s literally aerosolized oil, so definitely not a calorie-free food!

Re: Zerocal – A Serverless Calendar App in Rust

#55

Post by tuukkah »

omn1 wrote: post #15
spdustin wrote: post #14

I want to make sure I understand this: You made a VCALENDAR generator with a web-accessible endpoint. It fills in the VCALENDAR with info passed in via URL parameters. And rather than returning a webpage, it just returns the VCALENDAR file. So you send your friends the link, they click it, rather then returning text/html content, it returns a downloadable response consisting of a pre-filled VCALENDAR file with the co…

That's correct.

Then I missed the point and your use case. I re-read your article and this is the only sentence where I believe I could have got it if I read it carefully enough:

> Now I can finally send my friends a link to a calendar event for our next pub crawl.

I suggest you update the tagline to say "link" as there is no "terminal" involved. That is, you don't use cURL and you don't send a normal calendar invitation email, but instead you send a message with a link that gives them the ical file when they click it.

Re: Zerocal – A Serverless Calendar App in Rust

#56

Post by tuukkah »

tuukkah wrote: post #6

> I wanted a way to create calendar entries from my terminal. > There is no state on the server, it just generates a calendar event on the fly and returns it. Didn't see that coming. I suppose it's handy that you can call it anywhere curl is installed (or even use the browser address bar as your command line) instead of having to install and run the Rust program locally.

I seem to have missed the author's point which is to craft the link and send the link to others to download.

Re: Zerocal – A Serverless Calendar App in Rust

#57

Post by tuukkah »

tuukkah wrote: post #7
clircle wrote: post #5

I'm wondering if this or a similar tool could be hooked into emacs to make working with calendars in emacs a bit easier. I don't think there is a good way to send calendar invites to people from emacs (but happy to be wrong on this one).

As seen in the article, the invites are simple text files. (I haven't tried, but you might be able to create one with icalendar-export-region?) I think the more difficult part is sending an email that looks and works right with the invite attached in a way compatible with the receiving systems. Invitations from Microsoft systems are especially horrible as they look like normal, plain text messages (without an invite)…

I seem to have missed the author's point which is to craft the link and send the link to others to download. This way, it doesn't matter whatsoever what software is used.

Re: Zerocal – A Serverless Calendar App in Rust

#59

Post by belkarx »

melony wrote: post #51
belkarx wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using Heroku, but thinking back it may have been just a factor of inexperience (I don't do web much, not had I used Heroku before and the UX is not great there). I can't actually remember which go framework I used, but I associate negative feelings with the experience (take this entire thing with a grain of salt - I just thought shuttle.rs + the general rust buildsystem seemed so much cleaner than what I recall…

We have come a long way since Heroku. Vercel/Zeit has really raised the bar and expectations for a modern PaaS.

Noted, thanks, I'll check them out!

Re: Zerocal – A Serverless Calendar App in Rust

#60

Post by jonathankoren »

tuukkah wrote: post #58
jonathankoren wrote: post #54

Given that this just creates an ics file, why bother with a server at all?

Apparently, to craft and send the link rather than the file.

I guess. It’s just so lazy. If you’re making a cli tool, why is it curl with a hand crafted url? At least have a custom executable or script bunch of options so you have checks against misspelling “description”.
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