this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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39
Why Journiv Doesn't Use CalDAV (And Why That Makes It More Open) (lemmy.world)
submitted 7 months ago by rockstar1215@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hello all!

Thanks for all the interest and support you have shown for Journiv so far. If you don't already know about Journiv:

Journiv is a self-hosted private journaling application that puts you in complete control of your personal reflections. Built with privacy and simplicity at its core, Journiv offers comprehensive journaling capabilities including mood tracking, prompt-based journaling, media uploads, analytics, and advanced search. All while keeping your data on your own infrastructure.

CalDAV and VJOURNAL are pretty popular in self hosted world and it has been asked few times why Journiv does not use VJOURNAL. So I wrote a blogpost about it to share my research and learning from initial days of Journiv.

If you find anything technically incorrect or have any feedback/suggestion around this I will love to hear it! I think there are lot of experts/users of CalDAV and VJOURNAL here from whom I can learn more.

Thank you.

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[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I read the entire article,and you seem a bit prickly about caldav, but that is of course your prerogative.

I do wonder if your users are asking for caldav because their use-case make caldav a valuable translation for the rest of their digital lives... Maybe it would be helpful to understand what parts of caldav are interesting to users and what they might actually be asking for.

[–] rockstar1215@lemmy.world 5 points 7 months ago

In CalDAV specification journal is supported by VJOURNAL which is not specifically CALDAV.

My understanding so far is that no one specifically uses VJOURNAL due to lack of its adoption and features but have a feeling it is a standard which should be followed based on the fact how dominant CALDAV is but VJOURNAL is not CALDAV and is not same. The post goes in details about limitation and issues with VJOURNAL.

[–] l3db3tt3r@piefed.social 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

@rockstar1215@lemmy.world OP,
Suggestions:

  1. Provide a couple real use case examples for why people may be asking for these PRs.
  • Probably revolve around user familiarity with their current use cases using CalDAV and friends.
  1. Build an import/export adapter.
  • Link to relevant examples, resources, and/or documentation. It's a call to action, so give readers a direction.
[–] rockstar1215@lemmy.world 5 points 7 months ago

Thank you. I will incorporate this.

[–] mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud 1 points 7 months ago

Maybe also talk to nextcloud and see if the vjournel could be improved?

[–] thelocalhostinger@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Good blog post, thanks for sharing.

I fully agree with your points about real openness, I think this "file over app philosophy" is the way to go for every self hosted app – make it possible get the data out of there.

What I did not quite understand is why using XML is slower? Why is that – are parsers just slower in general? I do not have a lot of experience with XML, but I always thought it pretty much doesn't matter whether you send your data via JSON or XML. And how does your JSON structure solve the problem of "content heavyness"?

[–] rockstar1215@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

Hello, Sorry for the late reply. I do not use lemmy that often and only saw this now when I came here to post about new release. You're right to call that out. I made an oversimplified claim. Let me clarify, XML vs JSON performance is nuanced:

  1. Parsing speed: JSON is generally faster to parse than XML because:
  • Simpler syntax (no opening/closing tags, no attributes vs elements decisions)
  • Less data structure overhead
  • More direct mapping to native data structures in most languages
  1. Payload size: XML is typically more verbose due to:
  • Opening and closing tags
  • Namespace declarations
  • Attribute syntax
  • This means larger network transfers

However:

  • Well-optimized XML parsers can be very fast
  • The difference matters more for high-volume APIs than occasional journal syncs
  • For large text content (like journal entries), the actual content dwarfs the format overhead