Offline Working Tool (OWT)

The Offline Working Tool (OWT) allows CMS users to work on basic CMS tasks without needing to be connected to the internet. It was designed with the following goals in mind:

• keep up to date with changes in the central Web-based CMS (e.g. changes to folder organisation)
• optimised for a low-bandwidth Internet connection. In practice, this means that any data updates should be incremental.
• gracefully withstand network drop-outs, data corruption, etc.

The OWT used the following technology components:

• PHP-GTK for the stand-alone desktop tool
• XML-RPC (based on eZPublish 2.2 libraries) for client-server communication
• SQLite for local persistence in the client
• libCurl for handling resumable downloads of data
• Nullsoft Scriptable Installer for making an installer package under windows

The February 2005 edition of International PHP Magazine features my article about the development of this tool.

I gave a presentation about the tool at OSCOM4. For more details see my proposal.

Source code for the system is available here.