One other major concern of Intent is collaboration, which is in the heart of the documentation process.

I did not have time to talk about it, but in fact intent relies on a distributed architecture. We have a central repository, in which we store the Intent document as a model, and many other useful information (like all the compilation and synchronization issues or traceability informations).

Each feature of Intent is managed by a client of this repository : the eclipse editor is just one among many. The synchronizer, compiler, indexer, doc exporter are also clients, that communicate through a notification mechanism ensured by the Repository. We can perfectly imagine an Orion-based Editor connected to such a repository.

This repository concept is totally abstract, and can be developed with many concrete back-ends. For now, our repositry is an hidden folder in the eclipse workspace, but we would also like to define a CDO-based Intent Repository. If you do not know CDO, you should definitely check the CDO documentation. In a nutshell, CDO allows live sharing of models, with real-time updates and lock management to avoid conflicts.

With a CDO back-end, many users would be able to read and edit the same document, and collaborate in real-time (a bit like Google doc). We could use a pessimist locking approach to avoid any conflict on the documentation.

We have many other ideas in mind, and we would be glad to discuss with you to determine which would fit your needs.