There are lots of ways to help the openDias project:
The project requires urgent help in the following areas. If you can help, please get in touch via the forum or drop us an email.
The application road-map can be seen here.
Developers can interface into openDias using the published API to build alternative (eg android app) or enhanced frontend (eg batch input) interfaces, or as a reference when developing on the backend.
The application is written in C with a little C++ to handle some libraries, and is multi threaded. Each of the child thread handles HTTP request from clients (users). The parent thread is reserved to process SANE requests (sane cannot be multi threaded), by opening a local port that will queue SANE command requests from one of the HTTP handling threads.
The application uses SQLITE 3 to store, system configuration, user configuration and document details. Media files (scanned images and imported docs) are stored as individual files on the filesystem. All session and accounting information is held in memory and not retained between restarts.
When a client makes a request, one of the child threads handles it. It's HTTP contents is parsed and the data validated before it's dispatched to a method specifically written for each of the API calls. The method will construct the response that eventually gets passed back to the client.
If the HTTP request is going to be a long running process, ie a scanning operation, a new thread is created (parented by the client thread) which will actually handle the processing of the request. The parenting thread (the client thread) simply responds with a reference that can be used in followup API calls (to check progress).
If a method needs SANE functionality, a command request is built and sent to the application parents thread port, who processes the SANE request and replies to the calling thread with details of what happened. It's then left to that processing module to handle any errors appropriately.
The UI is essentially just a few static HTML files. These files load Javascript (usually JQuery) that make AJAX requests to the backend to query for information (eg document details or list of currently available scanners) or trigger actions (make a new scan, update details or import documents).
As long as proper API calls are made, a completely different frontend could be used in place of the bundled GUI.