Hey,
I've tried to help out with latexlab.org for a while. But basically that's a lot of unneeded extra work. Opengoo already has most of the stuff we need.
For Latex, and I imagine for a whole lot of other document systems that work with any kind of compilation, what is basically needed is a text window to edit a simple text file (maybe with some javascript for some fancy markup). The file is preferably stored in the database. But when the user pushes a button to download a PDF, the file must be copied to the file system, along with the other text files marked as Latex-source in the same workgroup, and the document has to be compiled and the end-product, the PDF-file, has to be pushed to the user.
I imagine that once you guys want to integrate such features as Word- or PDF-download, you'll run into that same problem (having to copy it to the file system to then run some "compiler" over it, like HTML2DOC).
So I wonder, given that you'll solve that anyways, if it would be so much harder to just write a plugin for Opengoo for Latex using all the hooks you're creating anyways.
What do you say? Does that sound completely unrealistic?
I've also looked into the current Latex cutting edge development version, and it shouldn't be completely impossible to get the compiler to access a MySQL database directly. However, that will still be years into the future.
