First of all, I would like to apologize for my absence lately -- alongside the 16 college credit hours I've completed this semester (Intro to Software Engineering, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Macro Economics, and Intro to World Civilizations), I've also been putting in 30+ hours a week with my internship, so I haven't had much time for anything else.
That brings me to the subject at hand: I've begun developing an application that will serve as an open source alternative to those provided by Kofax, Abbyy, and Iris. Once completed, it will support plugins, be able to generate, print, and read barcoded cover sheets, import documents, capture documents from a scanner, extract text from documents, and export them to an external file (or in my case, a hot folder mapped to an Alfresco repository).
It was started out of necessity, as many of our clients are smaller businesses who cannot afford to drop $10 grand on a scanning station, and should they choose the more affordable desktop application, would prefer not to pay an additional $1.5+ grand for the privileges of generating and scanning barcoded cover sheets.
I have no intention of developing my own barcode or scanning libraries, or engineering my own OCR engine, but instead have chosen to leverage existing open source solutions that accomplish those tasks, and have gotten the application off to a good start.
Is there an interest in the community for such an application? To my knowledge, there is no [working] open source solution of this type in the wild, so it would be the first of its kind. If there is an interest, under what license should I place it? And are there any developers who would be interested in helping me get it off the ground?
The core application is written in Java, as I am most familiar with it and Java is cross platform (I can compile a single binary on 64-bit Linux and deploy it on 32- and 64-bit Linux, Windows, [Open-]Solaris, BSD, Mac OS-X, etc.), but there is plenty of room for C++ developers as interacting with the OCR engine and the Sane and Twain drivers requires use of the JNI (Java Native Interface), which allows the interoperability of Java and native C/C++ code.
Any help or suggestions I can get will be greatly appreciated. I am currently the only developer working on this, and could really use some assistance by somebody with a bit more experience than myself.
That brings me to the subject at hand: I've begun developing an application that will serve as an open source alternative to those provided by Kofax, Abbyy, and Iris. Once completed, it will support plugins, be able to generate, print, and read barcoded cover sheets, import documents, capture documents from a scanner, extract text from documents, and export them to an external file (or in my case, a hot folder mapped to an Alfresco repository).
It was started out of necessity, as many of our clients are smaller businesses who cannot afford to drop $10 grand on a scanning station, and should they choose the more affordable desktop application, would prefer not to pay an additional $1.5+ grand for the privileges of generating and scanning barcoded cover sheets.
I have no intention of developing my own barcode or scanning libraries, or engineering my own OCR engine, but instead have chosen to leverage existing open source solutions that accomplish those tasks, and have gotten the application off to a good start.
Is there an interest in the community for such an application? To my knowledge, there is no [working] open source solution of this type in the wild, so it would be the first of its kind. If there is an interest, under what license should I place it? And are there any developers who would be interested in helping me get it off the ground?
The core application is written in Java, as I am most familiar with it and Java is cross platform (I can compile a single binary on 64-bit Linux and deploy it on 32- and 64-bit Linux, Windows, [Open-]Solaris, BSD, Mac OS-X, etc.), but there is plenty of room for C++ developers as interacting with the OCR engine and the Sane and Twain drivers requires use of the JNI (Java Native Interface), which allows the interoperability of Java and native C/C++ code.
Any help or suggestions I can get will be greatly appreciated. I am currently the only developer working on this, and could really use some assistance by somebody with a bit more experience than myself.
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