[bt-devel] Backend Proposal

[Greg Hellings]

Martin,

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Martin Gruner <mg.pub at gmx.net> wrote:
> Hi Greg,
>
> sounds very interesting. Do you intend to make this new backend a
> separate library that can be used by BibleTime frontend and other frontends?

My proposal to Jaak was that BibleTime be separated into three unique
components each of which could be built relatively separately by CMake
flags.  Something akin to libbibletimebackend.so, libibletimerender.so
and the BibleTime executable.  Obviously the BibleTime executable
would require the other two libraries, but the backend would rely only
on Qt with SWORD and any other source libraries as options and the
render would (probably) rely only on Qt and the templating engine Jaak
has picked out whose name escapes me at the moment.  The renderer
might also rely on the backend depending on how tightly those two are
integrated.

The goal is very much twofold - to escape the requirement of
SWORD-only on the backside and to escape the requirement of
BibleTime's mouse & keyboard centered heavy GUI on the other end.
Various people have recently experimented with BibleTime in places
including touch interfaces down through mobile phones and we'd like to
make it easier for those people to write a native GUI that links to
BibleTime's library instead of feeling the need to dig deeply into
BibleTime to #ifdef their way to a slightly hacked UI.

Whether these other projects will exist as other UIs within the
BibleTime project or will be separate projects entirely remains to be
seen, but the hope is anyone who wants till be able to just build the
components they want and compile and link against the parts that are
useful to them.

--Greg