Contrary to popular belief, working on a client project gives us a generous margin of creativity and explore innovative solutions. Take the example of a recent project I was working on. The client required a collaboration-based calendar module for their application similar to Google Calendar. Initially we started developing it from scratch , but then, we found an awesome Jquery plugin.

“FullCalendar” provides a full-sized, drag & drop calendar. It uses AJAX to fetch events on-the-fly for each month. It also supports an intuitive interface to manage events that spans over multiple days or weeks. It is visually customizable and exposes hooks for user-triggered events (like clicking or dragging an event).

I decided to give it a try and utilize its hooks for user triggered events within our Rails application. This small effort resulted in a barebone Rails app that might provide a good base for your project which require calendar, scheduling or appointment features. I called it fullcalendar_rails and it is now available on github with a working demo at http://fullcalendar.vinsol.com.

Feel free to give your valuable feedback. I hope you will find this useful.

Update: On popular demand, I have added recurring events functionality with daily, weekly and monthly frequencies. It also allows for exceptions to recurring events including delete and edit features.