Daisy *DE*tachment client

People coming from classic office environments are easily lured into the benefits of centralized content management by the ease of use of the daisy wysiwyg editor.  Without losing a recognisable content authoring environment they are happy to find:

1. one centrally managed version of things
2. allowing easy collaboration
3. and a fully operational search

just to name a few.
The cost to pay for all of this however is that people always need to be online/connected to participate in the authoring-collaboration process.

One of the possible solutions to the offline authoring has been dubbed the Daisy Detachment and is assumed to work like this:

• from the repository a detachment is retrieved as a zip containing
• the part-content of course in bare format (and with known mimetype)
• additional metadata about the document (fields, versions, variants, ...)
• additional metadata about the repository server managing it
• possibly additional metadata about the doctype the document complies to
• possibly additional metadata about the kind of lock contained in this detachment
• during it's detached life this zip can be mailed over to anyone, and authored off-line through the 'detachment client'
• this client (registered to open on the daisy-detachment mimetype and/or file extension) should allow
• to visualize the mentioned metadata
• allow modifications to it (probably maintaining the original as well for optimistic locking support)
• spawn an appropriate content editor for the various parts that are first unzipped to some temp directory, and rezipped into the 'detachment' when the detachment-client is closed
• maybe check/revalidate the lock when online
• allow to 'save to the repository' when online
• could probably be launched/installed via java-webstart as part of the online daisy-wiki

If you are interested in this project, you should:

• know how to build decent Java Gui applications that can integrate with the most common desktop environments (the client itself is probably minimal and should thus not get in the way)
• be ready to get deep into the data-structure of the daisy-repository to decide what minimal part of the related data to a given document variant will allow a maximal set of tempting features

In the 2006 edition of GSoC a first stab at this client was created.  The code however needs an overhoal and further completion:

• bring it up to date with the 2.0 version of the repository
• change to reuse the format (and code) from the import-export tool if applicable
• provide a better desktop integration experience for various platforms (windows, linux and Mac)
• get it into shape to be shipped with the next Daisy Release