Back when I started this compatibility with clients was an issue; but I don’t use Android anymore. In any case, is this still an issue?

Um… How are we supposed to tell you if your unnamed DAV client will have problems with your unnamed new DAV server? Works fine for me.

Compatibility with Android usually means running DAVx⁵
f-droid.org/packages/at.bitfire.davdroid/

A larger package than just CalDAV and CardDAV would be to look into Gromox with Grommunio-DAV.
It’s on my “I should check this out” list, so no personal experience.
github.com/grommunio/gromox
github.com/grommunio/grommunio-dav

They also have support for Exchange ActiveSync through another optional addon
github.com/grommunio/grommunio-sync

Security in software is about implementation, not different programming languages. Security as a whole is also not something you can achieve just by installing “secure” software - every software has bugs and vulnerabilities. Some of them are known, others are unknown and not every one of them automatically poses a security risk to you, this depends on the bug, your usage and environment. You can try to harden your system, but you need to do this in layers and the application code is just one of them.

For example, you could geoblock IP addresses so their requests never even reach your application. This does not mean that you’re automatically safe from attackers from e.g. Russia, but you make yourself a less easy target.

There are many other defense mechanisms like request limiting, dynamically blocking malicious requests with something like Fail2Ban, strong authentication, frequent patching, network segregation, virtualization, and so on. I hope you see where I’m going. Security is complex and depends a lot on your personal threat model.

That being said, if you need to know how secure the code of a given software is, you need to find something that has recently been audited or audit it yourself.

I’ve never had any issues with Radicale, which is dead simple and lightweight. If you end up with Android again, DAVx5 has also never given me any trouble, and it also allows calendars to be cached offline. I’m not sure how you’re having compatibility issues as I would think CalDAV is a standard protocol?

If you’re concerned about dependencies and security, why not use Docker or Podman? It makes most of self-hosting in general much simpler, and it’s much easier to secure since it’s containerized. With containers, even if a hacker somehow hacks your CalDAV server, they can only access the minimal resources that you’ve given the container. I use this repo for Radicale on Docker.

I use radicale. Safe and solid. Zero php.

You need to install a separate app if you want a web based calendar ui, or you can just use dav5x on android or any other caldav client.

I think Radicale, Baikal, SabreDAV or NextCloud are the most common choices. I read those names a lot.
But I believe only one of those isn't written in PHP.

I'd really recommend digging into the "hacking" though. Unless you learn from your specific mistakes and avoid that in the future, you might run in to the exact same issue again. And I mean it could be a security flaw in the program code of the WebDAV server. But it could as well be a few dozen other reasons why your server wasn't secure... (Missing updates, insecure passwords, missing fail2ban, a webserver or reverse proxy, unrelated other software... There are a lot of moving gears in a webserver and lots of things to consider.)

I’ve been using Nextcloud for almost a decade (started with Owncloud), publicly exposed to the internet with no VPN, and I’ve had no issues with security or with DAV. I do nothing special besides keeping it up to date (And using strong passwords, I guess)

Stalwart recently released CalDAV & CardDAV support, and it’s what I use for mail. It’s pretty secure by default too.

Good choice. I’ve been running Radicale for years, reverse proxied behind Caddy, and it’s been solid.