• Overview
  A tool for journalists, a
  document catalog, both.
• Search
  Our catalog has more than
  one million public documents.
• Open Source
  Our work is open source.
  Contribute your ideas.
• Get Help
  Learn about DocumentCloud's
  advanced features and API.
• Who We Are
  Meet the people
  making this happen.

As we work on DocumentCloud, we're constantly building pieces of infrastructure that could be useful for other organizations that work with similar kinds of data. We're releasing as we go by extracting useful components as standalone open source projects. Please follow our work if you're interested in what lies under the hood.

DocumentCloud Projects

• Backbone.js

  A JavaScript library that helps you structure your client-side code with Models, Collections, and Views. Used heavily in the DocumentCloud workspace.

• NY Times' Document Viewer

  We collaborate with the New York Times on their HTML5 document viewer, a key component of DocumentCloud.

• Docsplit

  A command-line utility and Ruby library that converts documents into PDFs and breaks them apart into images and text.

• PDFShaver

  Shave pages off of PDFs as images.

• Jammit

  An asset packaging plugin for Rails, which we use to help the DocumentCloud interface load as fast as possible.

• Underscore.js

  Our most widely-used project: a library of functional programming helpers for JavaScript that fit in nicely alongside jQuery.

• CloudCrowd

  A parallel processing system that we use to farm out PDF conversion across a number of servers on EC2.

• Pixel Ping

  A lightweight pixel-tracking server that we use to keep tabs on embedded documents, and send traffic to contributing organizations.

• VisualSearch.js

  A rich search box with built-in autcompletion for faceted search queries.

Our Code in the News

• Getting Started with Backbone.js
  Nettuts+, Apr 28, 2011

• Node Tutorial Part 19: Backbone.js
  DailyJS, Apr 04, 2011

• A Backbone for JavaScript-Heavy Web UI
  Dr. Dobb's, Feb 27, 2011

• CloudEdit: A Backbone.js Tutorial with Rails
  James Yu, Jan 27, 2011

• Thought Leaders in the Cloud: Talking with Aron Pilhofer
  Microsoft TechNet, Jan 18, 2011

• Create JavaScript Apps with Backbone.js
  Think Vitamin, Jan 12, 2011

• Interview: Jeremy Ashkenas Talks About CoffeeScript
  ReadWriteWeb, Jan 07, 2011

• Episode 0.2.9 - CoffeeScript and JavaScript
  The Changelog, Jul 23, 2010

• Ruby + AWS == Easy Map-Reduce
  Def Science, Jan 22, 2010

• 2009 Open Source Top Ten
  Ones, Zeros, Majors and Minors, Dec 17, 2009

• Episode 0.0.5: Document Cloud and Underscore.js
  The Changelog, Dec 06, 2009

• Jammit: Industrial Strength Asset Packaging for Rails Apps
  Rails Inside, Nov 17, 2009

• New library gives JS what it should have
  Ajaxian, Oct 29, 2009

• Ruby5: Episode 10
  Ruby5, Sep 15, 2009