Online Offline Publication System

The Online Offline Publication System is a project being developed by Reflab in collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP) to answer a very basic need: to have always updated information available in the fields, without the need of a permanent internet connection.

Generic, long term solution

Many organizations, in particular in the humanitarian sector, face similar challenges. This product aims to be be as generic and durable as possible: generic because the needs in terms of knowledge sharing / information distribution are broad: manuals, guides, catalogues, etc. sometime very custom applications. The OOPS software architecture and the modules developed allow a wide range of different deployments and customizations. Durable because the adopted approach is to reuse existing technologies and setups in a very light and modular way so that a minimum of development can solve the different use cases. OOPS is in fact a collection of small modules, in particular working on Gears and soon on HTML5 technologies.

OOPS is an open source product on Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/online-offline-ps maintened by Reflab with the support of WFP (UN World Food Programme) and collaborating partners. It is available with no restrictions to use to any organization.

Architecture

The architecture focus is on simplicity and flexibility of code and deployment.

The solution we propose is a 3 tiers architecture made of:

1) Backoffice
The backoffice part is where information is organized. For a manual for example different approaches are possible; for the LOG the need was for a structured organization similar to a classic book or manual. In this case Plone (http://plone.org) was used.

2) Online publication
The content and structure produced in the backoffice are then transformed into static HTML and Javascript. The final result is a website produced as static, but with a CMS or application behind. HTML is dumped on filesystem and served by Apache or other web server. The main point of this intermediate transformation is to separate production and delivery to better serve the contents where needed. Search is be provided by a JavaScript libraries that will also be used on the offline version.

3) Offline and portable
Once the publication has been transformed in static HTML and Javascripts it is brought offline using Gears and in a near future HTML 5. Gears is an open source project that enables powerful web applications, by adding new features to web browsers, in particular it can cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) locally with Localserver and store data (for indexing and search) locally.

Portable version

The web publication can also be downloaded as a stand alone application into a USB key, external hard disk, laptop or other storage. This is the fastest and most simple way to get the manual/catalogue/etc. offline. With the portable version it is possible to easily move the publication from a device to another, copy it and pass it to co-worker and in general bring it to the fields before leaving. As for the offline version on Gears the portable version can be updated with latest revised and new contents whenever an internet connection is available. The portable version also address current Gears limitation, i.e. the need of installing a browser add-on. Portable version can be customized with branded look and feel and it is optmized to minimize bandwidth usage.

First OOPS release

The first release of the project is package that include Plone as a backoffice for a simple manual composition.

The OOPS  package can be downloaded for free; see the DemoInstall how-to: http://code.google.com/p/online-offline-ps/wiki/DemoInstall