Xao, a project very near and dear to my heart. The Xao software project began on Xao Inc, a company I used to work at landed a largish (for a small software firm)contract to develop a order system linking 3M, Brady, Loctite and several other manufacturers with a mid market distributor. While much of the project is not web viewable, the public web site portion is viewable RS Hughes - industrial distributor.
One of the interesting challenges we faced with the project was the distributor's need to incorporate content from a number of manufacturers. This meant taking data in widely varying formats, data structures and building a system that could normalize that data into a single structure.
Out of the work of for that system came a system initially called Clearingpoint. This little gem of software then got buried in the acquisition of Brave New Worlds by VA Linux Systems. When Xao was spun off from VA Linux we began work again on Clearingpoint. This eventually evolved into the Xao Software Suite. Since Xao Inc is no longer doing active development, Ejelta has taken over the project. Thalasar is currently actively involved in the Xao Software suite. Our current project is the forum object - which will add our own unique twist on forums. The initial forum object is due in mid June.