Afterthedeadline looks much more powerful, and I love that it does more than just simple spell checking. According to the documentation it should integrate well with the website's WYSIWYG CKeditor. Also, I skimmed the technical paper and it looks like there is quite of bit of sophisticated technology behind the grammar and styling analysis.

The only trouble with Afterthedeadline is that it is a bit of a resource hog. But this actually makes it a good candidate for an appliance as it would make sense to run it on its own and allocate resources as required.

Great find!

Jokes aside, I think it's well worthy of a patch. It's probably not going to be a high volume download but invaluable tool from what I can see! Looks good!

  I am a beginner with bash scripting, so if I've made some very basic blunder, please remember that I am only a few weeks past "Hello, World!" here.

 I began with a Turnkey Appliance with Lamp Stack, and started an install ofl sun- java6-jre.

#: Append the repository needed to install sun-java6-jre

echo -e "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu lucid partner" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sources.list

 At this point, if I apt-get sun-java6-jre, the process stops. I had a choice of attempting to use openjdk-6-jre, or to find a way to force the process through. I dug up this-

#: Force accept sun-java6-* EULA
debconf-set-selections << END
sun-java6-jre shared/accepted-sun-dlj-v1-1 boolean true
END
#: Update apt-get from /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sources.list
apt-get update
#: Install Java with apt-get
apt-get install sun-java6-jre -y
#: Confirm installation using java -version:
java -version
java version "1.6.0_22"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_22-bo4)

Next, I downloaded the .tgz for After the Deadline distribution using wget, and placed it into the /tmp/ directory

#:Download After the Deadline distro, store in /tmp/
wget http://www.polishmywriting.com/download/atd_distribution081310.tgz -O /tmp/atd_distribution081310.tgz

I decided to extract the archive to it's own directory, '/etc/adt/'

#: Extract atd distro and create a directory /etc/atd/
tar xvzf /tmp/atd_distribution081310.tgz -C /etc/

By default, After the Deadline is configured to listen on a local loopback from the same machine (127.0.0.1). In order to be able to access it on the Lamp srever, I had the option of configuring Apache or Nginx to proxy to it (according to the install notes), or editing the /etc/atd/run-lowmem.sh and changing the -Dbind.interface property.

 Since I wasn't sure how to set up the proxy, I chose to edit run-lowmem.sh (The server I'd set up only had the resources for the low memory version). I tried first to delete the -Dbind.interface property, but once I finished, it didn't seem to work, so I did:

ifconfig Eth0

 and noted my Eth0 ip address, then I edited /etc/atd/run-lowmem.sh

nano etc/atd/run-lowmem.sh

then replaced -Dbind.interface=127.0.0.1  with -Dbind.interface=[ip address from eth0]. I cobbled together a bash script to automate this, but it has not been tested:

#!/bin/bash
#: Parse ifconfig for ip address and saves in $IP
IP=`ifconfig  | grep 'inet addr:'| grep -v '127.0.0.1' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}'`
#: Change loopback ip to $IP
sed -i 's|127.0.0.1|$IP|' /etc/atd/run-lowmem.sh

 And, it seems, this does just as well-

sed -i 's|127.0.0.1|0.0.0.0|' /etc/atd/run-lowmem.sh

 I'm assuming that '0.0.0.0' translates to the default. Not quite clear on the proper way to handle this- should I be assigning a specific ip, or leaving it as defaut?

In this case, I made -Dbind.interface= the ip address assigned to eth0,and used port 1049 (I did not see any reason to change it).

#:Start AtD service.
cd /etc/atd/
./run-lowmem.sh

 The AtD getting started page suggests using this in a web browser as a teast:

http://127.0.0.1:1049/checkDocument?data=the+ball+was+thrown

Even after altering the ip address, it would not work.

The easiest other test I could find was to install the Firefox extension for AtD from  http://atdfirefox.wordpress.com/ . Then, I set the extension to use my server by editing the about:config page, and changed the value for "extensions.afterthedeadline.proofreadServer"
to the external ip address of AtD, server, port 1049.

 I have had no luck with it. I attempted to use it with LibreOffice, and the process simply froze.
Any advice?

Those are all great ideas, and I really appreciate the prompt reply. I need to do some studying on networking, and definitely start from the ground up- manually inserting amy ip address, pinging the server and so on to find the problem.

 I think the first thing I will do is to see how the 'official' AtD server acts, and make sure there isn't something on my machine that is sabatoging me, then go from there.

 I'll give it another go this evening, after I've stepped away for a few hours and can maybe have a fresh look. It could be something incredibly simple that I have overlooked. I'll go through the set up one step at a time, and report any useful findings.

And thanks again for the feedback.

Great question about the server. I've actually got it running on a Turnkey Server here linked to an Amazon EC2 account, or at least I did. don't want to run the server 24/7...  $0.09 an hour can add up eventually.

It did occur to me that part of my difficulty may be trying to run it with such low resources, since the AtD website recomends at leat a 2 core machine with 4GB RAM.

In anycase, it does, I managed to stumble upon a wordpress blog with some way more specific instructions. Actually, I don't know how I missed it, since it was linked on the download page. Doh!  I was really thinking inside out with the ip binding. AtD, according to this guide:

"After the Deadline will listen on port 1049 of your localhost. For security reasons it only accepts connections from 127.0.0.1.... you can edit run.sh and change -Dbind.interface=127.0.0.1 to reflect the external IP address of your server."

I was using the internal ip addresses, and the answer is so obvious. Don't know how I got on the wrong path. With any luck I should have it up and running in the morning,  and I'll share the results.

 Well, I am sorry to say that after a long night trying to impliment this solution ... looking for other answers... not liking those answers... staring at tumblr for long moments...looking for new answers, going to Rik for answers, etc., I have decided I'll probably have to step back from this one for a little bit, due to other obligations. Hopefully, I will have some other interesting things  to post about in the meantime, and I will be getting back to this when possible.

 Thanks, Rik, Jeremy, you guys are great encouragement.