DAISY SDK - Multimedia Authoring Toolkit

Release 1.0 (16 May 2008)

This is the official 1.0 release document for the "DAISY SDK - Multimedia Authoring Toolkit", otherwise known as the "Urakawa SDK" (Software Development Kit).

The software is distributed under the open-source and business-friendly LGPL license.

Release Notes

Change Log

This release fixes a few issues identified in the previous 1.0-beta distribution, mostly related to Quality Assurance. This includes improvements to the XML Schema of the XUK format, added documentation, refined diagrams, and minor changes in the unit-tests.

Unfortunately due to the lack of resources, unit-tests coverage is not as complete as we originally envisioned it. We decided to release 1.0 anyway, based on the following rationale:

1. Obi is currently the only application that uses the Urakawa SDK, and so far test reports have not revealed any instability issues.
2. More importantly, our resources are quite limited and we now need to focus on the next generation of the SDK, which will be used by Tobi (the full-text full-audio DAISY authoring tool). Read-on for more information.

Development Strategy

Our plan is to maintain the SDK 1.0 in terms of fixing bugs and improving performance, essentially to support the development of Obi. However, any feature addition will take place in the SDK 2.0. The goal is to encourage new application developers to adopt the more up-to-date version of the toolkit.

Version 2.0 will provide more complete support for DTBook semantics, a new API for the rich DAISY navigation, and a refined extension model for XUK (to allow cross-processor interoperability). The C# API will also be updated to adopt language patterns from C# 2.0 more rigorously (e.g. getters and setters, generics).

Sourceforge to Trac Migration

As part of the ongoing effort to gradually migrate all DAISY software projects to a unique online collaborative space for developers, the Urakawa SDK has moved to a new location. Instead of Sourceforge, the project is now hosted at "CVS-Dude", where programmers (and to some extent, end-users too) benefit from a great software management environment called "Trac".

This solution provides a coherent set of tools that integrate with each other to facilitate documentation writing, iteration planning and tracking, bug-reporting, etc. The core components are: a wiki, an issue-tracker (bug/enhancement/feature-request database), an SVN repository (with built-in change-log and source browser), a roadmap planner (with milestone-based progress tracker), and a timeline view to keep up to date (with configurable RSS feeds). Additionally, a Bugzilla database is offered as a more complex alternative tracking tool, and a WebDav space is available for sharing files.

Deliverables

Abstract Data Model and API

• Reference Guide (single HTML file)
• API (Application Programming Interface) documentation (using the JavaDoc format):
  • ZIP archive
  • online browsing
• UML Class Diagrams (large PNG images):
  • ZIP archive
  • Note: PDF and SVG output can be enabled by using the project's ANT makefile.
• Source Code:
  • online browsing
  • Local SVN checkout:

    svn co https://daisy-svn.cvsdude.com/urakawa-sdk/tags/release-1.0/java

CSharp (C#) Reference Implementation

• C#-specific API documentation (using the Sandcastle format):
  • ZIP archive
  • online browsing
• Binaries (DLLs for Microsoft .NET):
  • ZIP archive
  • individual downloads
• Source Code:
  • online browsing
  • Local SVN checkout:

    svn co https://daisy-svn.cvsdude.com/urakawa-sdk/tags/release-1.0/csharp

  • compile instructions
• XUK XML Schema (in W3C xsd format)
• NUnit unit-tests (coverage and structure will be improved in SDK 2.0)
• UML Sequence Diagrams, essentially for round-trip XUK parsing and data-model serialization (warning: this is a useful but not authoritative definition of the XUK in/out process. Please refer to the source code for the exact routines)

Support

The Urakawa project's public website on Sourceforge will remain the central access point for the general audience. However, developers are encouraged to use the new Trac-based online collaborative environment. The Sourceforge.net developer page (issue-tracking, mailing-lists, etc.) is totally deprecated and is not used at all by the development team. Although the DAISY forums could eventually be a nice place for SDK-related discussions, we are currently not using this facility. Please contact us by email for further information, or if you wish to participate in any way.