[sane-devel] Gauging interest in an imaging application

[Sebastian]

I'm nearing v1.0 on an imaging library application that utilizes SANE for
aquisition. I'm writing it myself because I was unable to locate a similar
application out there in the OSS world. My employer is funding my time to
do so.

I'm writing to this list to gauge the interest of others in participating
on this project. I intend to release it under GPL at some point, however
before I put forth the effort to do so I'd like to know how much of a need
there really is. I know that commercial packages of this sort are quite
expensive.

The app is a document library, catalog, & scanning workflow, conceived
initially for digitizing invoices for an A/P department. It's entirely
web-based, and is written in OO Perl. It allows an organization to set up
multiple 'libraries', and scan documents into them using ADF-style
scanners.  Documents can be viewed, rotated, and downloaded in TIFF, PDF,
or Jpeg formats. Documents are indexed with customizable meta-data (from
data entry screens and/or links to external databases). Each library
configuration has the ability to specify meta-data fields and even
implement Perl hooks for customization, without impacting the base code or
other libraries on the server.

The scanning itself is network-based. Rather than use SANEd's network
support, however, I have implemented a SOAP/RPC interface between the
server and scanner host appliance(s). This way it is able to send
compressed TIFs rather than raw image data. In a WAN environment, this
bandwidth savings is great, and allows large documents to be imaged at
remote offices and sent to a central server, without much impact on the
WAN.

I'm presently working on a mini-linux flash image for the scanner hosts,
so that inexpensive terminal appliances can be used to 'network-enable'
scanners.

So:

Is this something you'd use?
Is this something you'd help improve?

Thanks for any input. Feel free to send responses to me, I'll summarize to
the list.

Sebastian