$Id$

DocGen is software to automatically generate DocBook format XML documents from
high level descriptions of IPSAN project implementations based on the OmniPresenceII
model originally developed at Telstra circa 2005.

DocGen is Copyright (c) Justin Warren <daedalus@eigenmagic.com>.
All Rights Reserved.

History
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Some media coverage of the OmniPresence project, and related projects:

  * http://media.netapp.com/documents/telstra.pdf
  * http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/news_rel_20061024.html
  * http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,,23351320-24171,00.html?from=public_rss

DocGen was created by Justin Warren <daedalus@eigenmagic.com> in his
spare time in 2006 to assist in the automated creation of complex, yet
repetative, documents for the Enterprise Backup and Recovery (EBR)
project, which used the same IP network as the OmniPresence storage
infrastructure. I found manually cutting and pasting into Word
documents mindlessly tedious, and by abstracting the process with
DocGen I could create in a couple of hours what used to take anything
from a full day to an entire week.

DocGen is a personal obsession with documentation combined with a
dislike for mindless, tedious busywork. I knew that no company would
fund such a project internally, because they would not see the value
up front. So, I built it at home, on weekends and at night when I
should probably have been having a life or something. On the plus
side, I own the code, so who knows, I might make some money from it
one day.

The original software was written in XSLT 1.0 to assist with
portability. This proved complex, due to the lack of certain features
(like loops!) in XSLT 1.0. DocGen was then completely rewritten in
Python around April/May of 2007 which substantially increased its
flexibility, ease of maintenance, and the ability to quickly add new
features. 

DocGen is gradually being made more abstract so that the same codebase
can be used for multiple organisations without having to modify the
code, as it was originally built with hardcoded values for
organisation specific functions (such as IP addresses). This made it
easier to implement features, but required significant modifcations to
adapt the software from one organisation to another.