What is Touchbase?

Touchbase is a collection of software components that use a content repository to manage data. These components are primarily focused towards communications and productivity - also commonly known as groupware.

The rich client that you see in the demo is called Touchbase Views. This client combines all the Touchbase components into a single application, similar to Microsoft Outlook, or Gnome Evolution. The table below highlights a feature comparison with these two popular applications.

A feature comparison of groupware applications
	Touchbase Views	Microsoft Outlook	Gnome Evolution
Open Source
Free
Repository-based
Archiving
Windows
Linux
Mac OSX
CalDAV
XMPP
Exchange

NOTE: The demo requires Java 6. In addition a Gmail or Gtalk account is highly recommended.

Hi Everyone. Touchbase has been a pet project of mine for some time now, however it has mostly resulted in more rewrites than I care to count without making any significant progress.

I primarily put this down to plans that are too grand for a single developer to implement in his spare time. So I've decided to open the floor to the wider community to see what we can make of this idea.

I believe that it is possible to write a first-class communications tool in Java, as we almost (*) have all the components required to make this a reality.

* Still waiting on the HTML component, but it's coming..