Plans

I thought that you might be interested in the plans I have regarding this service and the directions of its development. Recently I started digging in the code and (since every test takes some time) I decided to give you an outlook on what I am working on right now. So here we go:

1. Monitoring. Sometimes things just don't work. And open-tran.eu may go down once a while due to unknown reasons. Few weeks ago I decided to start monitoring the website in order to provide constant service. There were few bogus outages, but it already proved useful in April, when the site went down. In the right pane of this blog you will find a button that leads to public uptime statistics for the site:
   
2. Better performance. I decided to reorganize the database a little bit and make it more compact. Right now I am working with a set of 3 languages on my local computer and the results look promising. If everything goes right, I should upgrade the service in the coming week.
3. Off-line mode. New database schema will allow downloading an arbitrary set of languages for off-line use. One language pair will require approximately 100MB space and will provide exactly the same functionality (but using a desktop app). I will provide the databases and a set of console tools for updating the database and accessing the translations. The complete documentation will also be posted on the website.
4. openSUSE translations. The openSUSE translations were brought to my attention by their maintainers. Adding them to the database looks like a piece of cake, so this is going to be the first thing I will do as soon as the upgrade is complete.

There is one small disadvantage of the new release. It won't be possible to trace the translation back to its source, because this information is dropped in order to make the database more compact. You will still be able to see which project uses this translation and how many times, but that will be all. If you have any comments or other ideas, just post a comment or send me an e-mail.