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openHAB can integrate Google Calendars. The functionality is kind of limited, it can only see the current and the next calendar event, but in my case that is enough. More about the use case in another blog post.

There are three different calendar bindings available, let's have a quick look:

• CalDAV Personal Binding: this is a v1 binding, which means it will no longer work in the soon-to-be-released openHAB v3. Apparently this works with Google calendars, but has performance issues. It can show the current and next event.
• Google Calendar Scheduler: also a v1 binding. Needs more work for presense simulation, and additional bindings.
• iCalendar Binding: v2 binding, should work with v3. It can show the current and next event. That's the one I'm going to use.

If the calendar plugin Thunderbird Lightning stops working after a system upgrade (Ubuntu 8.04 -> 9.10 in my case), just reinstall the libstdc++5 library. Before installing the library you have to deinstall the plugin from thunderbird and reinstall it afterwards.

The Thunderbird behaviour is a bit curious: the calendar and todo tabs are shown, but all previously defined calendars are missing. In addition it is not possible to add new calendars, these options are greyed out.