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My wife is starting a new business and wants me to create a website for her that will allow clients to book appointments. I could obviously go ahead and start building something from scratch, but given that this is a fairly standard problem, I would prefer to reuse an existing solution (preferably in Java, but there is some flexibility on this) or build on top of a hosted solution like Google Calendar. What would you recommend?

John Channing
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4 Answers4

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There are extensive tools for the Google Calendar API. Specifically read the Google Calendar Developer's Guide.

cletus
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  • Depends on the business. I wouldn't want to trust my business' appointments to Google. There are tons of calender API out there. – Aiden Bell May 16 '09 at 21:32
  • I know I'd trust Google in this department more than Microsoft (Exchange) although the issue with Exchange is not about privacy, it's about it working efficiently or at all. But many people have the same privacy concerns. Fair enough but it's overblown I think. – cletus May 16 '09 at 21:37
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Do NOT build your own from scratch; it's a surprisingly hard process (if you're curious, look into the iCalendar standard; there's a surprisingly large amount of complexity involved). As someone who has tried to develop this sort of thing from scratch before, I'd highly recommend using an existing hosted solution such as Google Calendar.

Paul Sonier
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Online booking systems are much more complex than they appear. You'll need to take into account double booking prevention, for example.

Rather than re-inventing the wheel, you could use an existing online booking system like www.EzyOnlineBookings.com. It's inexpensive, flexible enough to handle most scenario's, and looks quite nice. Also, it integrates directly with Google calendar, if your wife prefers to use Google calendar for business.

MG123
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I've just made an open source Android library to do this but it is very simple to turn into a standard java library. Here is the landig page: https://bitbucket.org/warwick/schedule_utils_demo/src/master/

The library supports calculating when an entity is next available based upon schedule items, hours of business and given time.

It also has a method to get a list of available slots between given times based upon hours of business and schedule items. You can fork the repo and refactor it over to JavaScript or what ever language you want.

Hope this helps

user2288580
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