[jsword-devel] Efficient Bible Text Storage Formats

[Erik Reitsma]

Hi,

Thank you Stephen, for your very interesting ideas. This sounds like a
very useful format indeed. Definitely suitable for what I was looking
for... Can this format be used freely? (I mean, without patents or so?)
You seem to sell some software, so I can imagine that you would like to
make money from this too (which would be quite deserved). I was planning
to release whatever I would write as GPL, especially if it would be an
extension to JSword (I would not have a choice). But if we could share the
file format, and the conversion tools would be freely available, that
would be good for me. :) I would only release something for the P800/P900
in PersonalJava, but I can imagine that it can run quite easily on other
devices that run PersonalJava. I hope that is not a problem for you if we
would use the same file format.

Perhaps the JSword experts could shed a light on whether it would be wise
to make an API to this format that can replace the XML-reading of JSword.
If bibles in this format will become available (and if anyone can even
generate themselves), what would adding a JSword API to this format?
Or would this format be so different from the JSword file format (XML
tree), that it would be more efficient to make something in Java for
reading this file format, without using any JSword functionality?

If you would have an example bible file available, I could have a go at a
reader for Java. Plain text would be fine for a first release for me, but
it would of course be even better to be able to use all features of the
bibles and books that the Sword project has available.

Regards,
*Erik.