Ask HN: Review DocumentCloud.org

'Morning, HN. For the last year and a half, @samuelclay and I have been working on DocumentCloud, a non-profit organization that makes it easier to analyze, annotate, and publish the primary source documents behind the news.

We just opened up the public version of the workspace, and I'd be obliged if y'all could take a look, and share your thoughts. There has been a lot of interest in seeing a real-world example of a webapp that uses Backbone.js, Underscore.js, and Jammit -- and this is the application that all of our open-source libraries have been extracted from.

To get your hands dirty, visit documentcloud.org/public, and try a search for "filter: annotated". Then, pop open your JS console, and you can play around with the Backbone models:

    Documents.first().get("title");

    Documents.map(function(doc){ return doc.get("title"); });

    Documents.first().notes.fetch();

    Documents.first().notes.first().set({title: "Testing..."});

... don't worry, that last one didn't persist anything to the server. If you try a .save(), it'll be denied.

A couple other fun things to try:

* Drag a box to select a couple documents, and choose "Analyze -> View Timeline".

* Pop open the entities tab, and click on "show pages" next to an entity to view all of their mentions in the text.

* Click on a document's page count...

I'd love to hear your thoughts, from both technical and design perspectives, and would be glad to answer any questions that you have about the app.

Off-topic: But I really do love this little gem found on DocumentCloud - http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/10404-chris-kick-ass-...

I'd like to just give a big shoutout to the DocumentCloud team and their huge contributions to the open source community. I've been using underscore, backbone.js, and jammit extensively over the past few months, and it's been a joy to work with, and also well documented enough for me to extend and customize.

So, to the DocumentCloud team I say: a big THANK YOU!

I'm so impressed with the level of personal projects on YC right now, I don't remember a time when it's been better. I hope my project meets the standard you're setting.

Hats off, i'm inspired.

If you're a web developer, backbone.js will teach you how to make gui apps!

I've been working with MVC style frameworks for quite a while on the server-side but until backbone I've never been able to get my head around how to create a gui app using MVC. It was never clear where and how to put things and before I knew it, everything would go spaghetti on me.

I've done lots of js and lots of js intensive apps and I always hated it because of all the lack of structure and mix of concerns everywhere.

For the last two months, I've been using backbone.js, underscore.js, jammit and coffeescript (which is also made by jashkenas) in a quite complex app. Because of them I was able to massively rework things based on changing requirements without ending up with dead code, or strange pieces that are somehow working but not really needed.

I can't say this enough. Backbone.js really helped put order in my code and it was so easy to pick up that I am convinced you're really hurting yourself by not using it. The documentation is amazingly well done and has real examples of how you'd use the code, instead of just being generated from arguments and other relatively unimportant stuff.

Thanks jashkenas and samuelclay! And congrats on finally launching documentcloud.org. Keep kicking ass!