The Venice Web Communities System
Eric J. Bowersox <erbo@silcom.com> for Silverwrist Design Studios
Release 0.1 (Development), April 19, 2001
SourceForge Home: <http://sourceforge.net/projects/venice/>

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Description:
    The Venice Web Communities System is a system for supporting online
    communities and special interest groups.  A single Venice server will
    support multiple communities, and all users authenticating themselves with
    the Venice server will be able to join any community based on that server.

    Communities support multiple features, the first of which will be Web-based
    linear conferencing (along the lines of WellEngaged, UBB, and other
    conferencing systems).  Features to be added thereafter include instant
    messaging and chat (which will be based on the Jabber open-source
    instant-messaging system), calendars, link directories, e-mail newsletters,
    and possibly advanced features such as collaborative databases and content
    creation/publishing.

Implementation:
    Venice is written in Java using Java Servlet and JSP technologies, and
    runs under the Apache Tomcat applications server, release 3.2.  It is
    written to version 1.2.2 of the Java SDK (Java 2).  It also employs the
    Sun Java API for XML Parsing, the JavaMail API (and associated JavaBeans
    Activation Framework), and the Apache LOG4J logging class library.  It
    uses MySQL 3.23 as a database back end, via the mm.mysql JDBC drivers.

Licensing:
    Venice is licensed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License, Version
    1.1.  See the file LICENSE for details.

History:
    Venice's designed capabilities stem from the requirements for the Electric
    Minds online community, which originally ran on the WellEngaged
    conferencing software and was later ported to Durand Communications'
    CommunityWare online community system (which later became the "WebbMe"
    portal system of Webb Interactive Services).  WebbMe will shut down at the
    end of January 2001, leaving the community homeless; Venice is intended to
    provide it with a permanent, open-source home.

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Directory Structure:
    doc/ - Documentation, notes, and images to be used later
    etc/ - Configuration files
    lib/ - .JAR files (this is where the mm.mysql driver lives)
    setup/ - Files used in setup, notably the database initialization script
    src/ - The source code itself
    web/ - Web content and images