J2ME bible (was Re: [jsword-devel] Re: Unable to check out from CVS)

[Eric Galluzzo]

On Fri, 2003-05-09 at 20:28, Jacky Cheung wrote: 
> Agreed. Some devices (like J2ME Phone) are too small to store a bible.
> We need to search and retrieve them from Internet. For PCs, why we
> need to install bibles at all if we can also search and retrieve
> bible, dictionary, and commentary from Internet? When I was studying
> bible, I can just read the text of other bible version immediately
> without worrying about installing them. I can read BDB if I wanted to
> study the meaning of the original text.
> 
> We can achieve it in this manner...
> For bible services,
> 1. register itself to UDDI server on startup
> 2. serve for requests from clients
> 
> For the clients,
> 1. find all bible/dictionary/commentary web services from UDDI server
> 2. select one of the service (may be the program select it ramdomly)
> 3. connect to the service and get information (which bible is
> supported) about it
> 4. do search/retrieve whatever the user want
> 
> Web services need not host every bible version. But we can access any
> bible (at least those popular) if their enough people willing to host
> bible for the use of others.
> 
> Yes, there are much to do and maybe out of the scope of this project.
> But it is really worth doing and I think there is nobody else doing
> something similar.
> 
> What do you think?

Wow, that is a _really_ neat idea!  I hadn't thought of using UDDI. 
Now, for J2ME purposes, we probably still couldn't do that, because as
far as I know there isn't a UDDI parser for the KVM (although UDDI isn't
that complicated, so it might be feasible for us to write one).  But for
desktop purposes, that sounds great!  For laptops and such where one is
frequently offline (e.g. in the plane), it would still be good to
support local Bibles, commentaries, etc.

What would the interface be?  SOAP does impose some design constraints
upon one's interfaces (e.g. no Lists or Iterators, just arrays), but
apart from that could we not use the current JSword Book or Bible
interface as the SOAP object to expose?

	- Eric