I appreciate the hard work of everyone who's been contributing to
Lightning up to now. Thank you so much!

Ever since my employer switched from Thunderbird and a standalone
calender to Outlook/Zimbra (server) I've been using TB with Lightning.
 From my own experience I can tell that Lightning/CalDAV/Zimbra has come
a long way, but it still has ways to go. To make sure the calendar
entries aren't messed up after editing I need to use the Zimbra web
client instead of Lightning. I asked myself whether I could help in this
area.

For quite some time I've been looking for an OS project I'd be willing
to contribute to. I've been using OS software for years and now it's
time to show some appreciation - to give something back. I wonder
whether Mozilla Calendar is going to be my candidate.

For a die-hard Java and web developer like myself, being doing that for
a decade, XUL certainly might not be love at first sight but I want to
give it a try. However,  https://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Dev_Guide
quite prominently states at the top: "Warning: The content of this
article may be out of date."

That's not the kind of encouragement I need when I think about
contributing to a project. Is the guide outdate enough to no longer hold
any significance or will following it still get me up and running in no
time?

Cheers,
Marcel

--
Marcel Stör, http://www.frightanic.com
Couchsurfing: http://www.couchsurfing.com/people/marcelstoer
Skype: marcelstoer

Seriously, I think that guide will give you a general orientation even
though a number of the specifics in it are out of date. And especially
if what you want to get started with is the Zimbra interaction the guide
will be reasonably up-to-date (though it won't give you much that's
on-point) and you'll be dealing mostly with back-end code: no need for XUL.

Other resources you might find useful would be this group and the
#calendar channel at irc.mozilla.org. And, of course,
developer.mozilla.org and mxr.mozilla.org. When I first got interested
in contributing to calendar, jminta told me to just read everything in
/calendar/base/public. Like most advice, it was better than I realized
at the time. :)

bb