A couple of weeks ago, Google jumped into the online calendar space by launching Google Calendar (um, beta). The application is chock-full of Ajaxy goodness and plenty of features, but I’m here to talk about what you can do with your calendar data behind the scenes. Using some handy tools from the Swiss Army Knife that is the Zend Framework, I’ll show you how to pull data from your Google Calendar into your site. Just for kicks, I’ll also throw in a caching layer to keep things fast and reduce the network traffic between your server and Google.

Most people are familiar with doing searches on Google, and how Google formats search results. First, the search criteria text appears in a
bold font. Second, the text of the search results ends with an ellipsis (…) to let the user know that there is more information where that came from. These little UI features make it easy for readers to find what they are looking for.