Save more now with Calendar API!
By Lucia Fedorova,
Google Calendar API Team
Today we are enabling several ways to save your Calendar API quota, network bandwidth, and,
most importantly, batteries of your users' phones.
Previously, when you wanted to know whether a user changed the color of his calendar, you
would need to poll the server frequently, downloading the entire calendar list each time. This
is no longer necessary as we are announcing three major improvements to the Events, Calendar
list, ACL and Settings collections:
- Incremental synchronization using sync tokens.
Incremental synchronization allows you to retrieve only resources that have been modified
since the last time you synchronized and thus avoid retrieving all the resources in the
collection all the time. At the beginning of the synchronization process, you retrieve all the
resources you are interested in and store a sync token. On follow up requests, you can use the
sync token to restrict the results to only the resources that have changed since the token was
issued. This functionality is now available for all four main calendar collections. Learn
more
- Push notifications.
Push is a great way to avoid repeated polling. Last year we announced
support for push notifications for event changes. Now we are extending push notifications to
Calendar list, ACL and Settings collections. You start by subscribing to the collections you
are interested in. The server will figure out when something you are interested in has changed
and send you a notification. Learn
more
- Pagination.
Pagination gives you control over the number of results that you will retrieve from the server
so you can read through many results at your own pace. Events and Calendar lists have already
supported pagination for a while; today we are bringing you pagination for ACL and Settings
collections. Learn
more
Let's demonstrate what synchronization could look like:
“OK server, I would like all the settings of this user.”
“Here you go, dear client, all the entries and a small bonus called a
sync token.”
“Thanks, server! Please let me know if something changes in the
settings of this user.”
Later that day
“Hey client, the settings have changed. ”
“Cool, here is my sync token, what are the changes?”
“There have been many. I’m now sending you the first hundred of them
and a page token.”
“Got it! Here is the sync token and the page token, what else has changed?”
“Here are the remaining twenty new settings. And of course, a new sync token.”
“You are the best, server! Thank you!”
Lucia Fedorova is a Tech Lead of the Google Calendar API team. The team
focuses on providing a great experience to Google Calendar developers and enabling new and
exciting integrations.
Posted by Louis Gray,
Googler
