Constitutional Law

DocumentCloud Releases More Code, Continues to Attract Developer Interest

By Amanda Hickman

A public beta of DocumentCloud, one that journalists can kick the wheels on and upload documents to, won't be ready for a few more months, but work is continuing apace in our corner of the cloud. We've released a handful of code that comprises some of the components of our big picture, and it is great to see how well received our work has been by the Ruby and JavaScript communities. Last week we hit a little milestone: more than 1,000 developers are watching DocumentCloud projects on Git Hub, which is pretty cool. The advantage for us is that many of these developers are actually trying out our software releases and helping us make them stronger.

Gregg Pollack included a great review of CloudCrowd in a recent episode of his show, Scaling Rails. CloudCrowd will still be Greek to the truly non-technical readers out there, but if you have enough of a handle on software development to wish you understood"scaling" better, his review just might help.

Our latest release, Docsplit, is a command-line utility and Ruby library for splitting documents into distinct components such as raw text (which you need for searches), page thumbnails, and document metadata (details like the document's author or the number of pages it contains). Splitting documents apart is a pretty key functionality for DocumentCloud: everything else DocumentCloud does depends on the presence of one or another of these pieces. Docsplit got a lot of attention when we released it on Monday -- and we're all looking forward to seeing what other folks do with it.

Full post as published by MediaShift Idea Lab on December 10, 2009 (boomark / email).