The Remus project is a proposed open source project under the Technology parent project.
This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. Please send all feedback to the Remus Eclipse forum or Remus newsgroup.
With today's information technologies, the amount of information we consume daily is enormous. Efficient management and fast access to frequently used information has become more important than ever. The fact that we use a wide range of applications and digital mediums makes the aggregation of information, search and retrieval even more difficult. Managing a huge amount of information successfully requires an intelligent tool that enables users to file, categorize and visualize such diverse types of data as information units in a single application.
The application provides a rich interface to create, edit and view single information units with a type-specific information representation. The local data is browsable through a hierarchical or semantical structure.
Every information can be opened in a separate editor that generally will have at least one tab for a viewing-optimized representation of the information unit and other tabs for editing. All information units can be linked with each other and can have events attached. Events are visualized in a separate view, which is similar to the calendar view known from other applications like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird Lightning.
The application uses Apache's Lucene Technology to create a searchable index of all information units. Thus, the application provides a search view to initiate a search, a view for the search results and an extra information type for saving search queries. Users can save search queries, called 'Favorite Searches', and subsequently use these Favorites to execute regular search requests against a growing and dynamically changing information pool.
Search ranking mechanisms are injected by a declarative OSGi-Service and can be changed easily.
Remus provides a customizable desktop-panel which enables rapic access to often-used operations without having the entire application on the screen. For a screencast on how to use the panel, see http://www.remus-software.org/user-documentation/7-dektop-integration/14-the-desktop-panel.
The most critical point in information management is the easy and fast creation and transfer of data into another application. Remus uses a rule engine that makes it very easy to drag'n' drop (or copy/paste) relevant information into the system. Specific rules allow you to create complex information structures from, for example, unstructured text with a single drag'n'drop operation.
Today's information management landscape already offers a great number of excellent platforms for handling specific information types. Typical examples of such platforms, especially for user-generated content, are Youtube, Delicious or Flickr. They all share the same goal: providing an application structure for the management of one specific type of information (Youtube -> videos, Flickr -> images, ...). The goal of Remus is not to compete against these applications, but to facilitate and enhance your local information management by providing functionalities to browse through these remote information repositories and to synchronize your data in Remus with the information in other repositories. The advantages in a nutshell:
These are the most important capabilities of the Remus Framework:
The current development stage already integrates other Eclipse projects. There is full integration of BIRT Runtime and BIRT Designer, see http://www.richclient2.eu/2009_11_23/building-reports-of-your-local-information-pool-with-birt-and-remus/. The framework provides various possibilities for a seamless integration of other UI Elements like editors, viewers or even perspectives. Another example of third-party integration is Xtext (http://www.richclient2.eu/2009_09_01/extending-rim-with-xtext/) or XMind (for a screenshot see http://remus-software.org/images/stories/screenshots/general/6/mindmap.png).
Remus and all its contributions are currently licensed under the terms of the Eclipse Public License. Third-Party Libraries must be compatible to the EPL. There are currently just a few drawbacks:
The developer community is expected to grow as the need arises to integrate further specific information types or remote repositories.
The user community will primarily consist of people working in an IT based or academic environment. In view of the connectors to social platforms, it cannot be ruled out that the application will also be used for private purposes. Remus already has a small user community who is using the current nightly build.
The initial committer will focus primarily on the core functionalities of the underlying framework. An important requirement for the committers is to provide the necessary documentation and tools which will make easy it for interested parties to use the application as a framework for information management and to extend the application by integrating their own business-specific information structures or by connecting to their own proprietary remote information pools.
The following individuals are proposed as initial committers to the project:
The following Architecture Council members will mentor this project:
The following individuals, organisations, companies and projects have expressed interest in this project:
The first official release is scheduled for Q1 2010. The goal of this release is to meet the key requirements and to provide a basic set of information types and remote repository connectors.
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 22-Jan-2010 | Document created |
