Very nice! Since writing a thesis is a very special task I think it'd be great to have such a app be geared towards that purpose. In addition to the features I now know I needed, I feel like I've gathered quite some experience on how to achieve control, reproducibility and flexibility using AsciiDoc but I didn't have the chance to get it out of my head and written down :-) There are a few pitfalls with the asciidoc and dblatex chain which you only learn to navigate when you're in the middle of writing the thesis (floating images, word count, bibliography, organization etc.). The framework/workflow I've set up considers most of them already and has been a huge timesaver and ease of mind for me. You can see some of the underlying ideas went into the Makefile I shared and you could recycle/use them to get a head start on your thesis/project. I'd definitely be happy to collaborate with you and share all my (MIT-licensed) experience :-) Feel free to shoot me an e-mail, I'm certain you'll find me through a quick google inquiry [1] ;-)
Thanks much for writing this up! At some point, I hope to get to it, too ;-) Until then, I thought I'd share my approach on how I wrote my entire PhD Thesis using AsciiDoc here. In my field of High Energy Nuclear Physics, data analyses usually are accompanied by so-called "Analysis WebPages" which I generate from the same AsciiDoc source files using Wordpress and Stuart Rackham's blogpost [1,2]. Images and other binary files I organize and version-control at a central location using git-annex [3,4] which also allows me to easily backup and share figures with my collaborators online. Bibliographies I auto-generate from the usual bibtex file via asciidoc-bib [5]. I've developed a Makefile [6] that does all of the above "automagically", triggered by simple commands like `make thesis` (generate full PDF), `make hp` (push AsciiDoc source to corresponding Wordpress page), and `make tag` (generate a new thesis version based on git tag and upload to webpage). Unfortunately, my thesis isn't publicly available, yet, but will be soon along with the sources and git history (I hope). In the meantime, the HN readers with STAR privileges [7] can feel free to explore a full working example at [8-10].
A comment for the ROOT users (http://root.cern.ch/) amongst you HN readers: this appears to be very similar to 'ckon' which emerged from my PhD since 2011, and takes the humongous headache out of building C++ software modules within the ROOT analysis framework: http://tschaume.github.io/ckon/
@rachelbythebay: Since 'ckon' uses the same principles as your depot build tool, I thought you might be interested to take a look: https://github.com/tschaume/ckon :-)
extremely cool, guys! Especially liked the script functionality.
Just brainstorming: Do you guys have an API one could use to send python code to your app? Or even get back the plot to embed it in one's own app? That'd be helpful for many other (python based) web apps, I'd think.
P.S.: Where are the "Share/Tweet" buttons? :-)
[1] http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lbnl+huck