The true geeks amungsts us will know what an RFC is - they are, for the lack of a better explination, the building blocks of the internet. Technology memos that define its technology. I grew up with them on-line, and now I have a chance to write one.

It may sound odd - but it´s a pretty interesting experience. The gist of it is a formal standard for the transfer of availability and booking data between the on-line booking systems used by accommodations providers. If my proposal (or Internet Draft) is accepted it may become a RFC (Request For Comments) which basically becomes a new Internet Standard.

The whole motivation behind this is that quite a few of my web design customers are accommodations providers and many of them are starting to battle between having multiple different calendars on many different web sites - all of which require manual update. There is no communication and it´s simple too much work for them to update them all.

Enter my proposal the "Availability Data Exchange Protocol" ADEP. An attempt to standardize on the transfer of booking data in a secure, standard form.

It´s quite an undertaking and I´m only about 1/2 way through the first draft - but it´s a fascinating experience. I;ll get more into the details of it tomorrow with a bit of background on the RFC process and how it all fits together.

Why not use XML for that?  (Or SGML if you need extra power)

Actually - that´s exactly what I am using. XML - I´ve created the DTD - but it´s also the protocol for transferring the XML that will be key to preventing double bookings.

There are also mechanisms for auto-discovery, servers joining/leaving the community and I´m working on a way to transfer which server is the master for a particular object - but that might come in a phase two.