[jsword-devel] where can I help?

[DM Smith]

What is the emphasis of your grad degree. If I knew that I might be able 
to suggest something pertinent to your studies.

Under the JSword [eclipse project] area you will find bugs.txt which 
gives a roadmap of what is left. It notes most of what needs to be done 
other than the bugs that we accidentally introduce with our changes. You 
may see something in there that you would like to work upon.

In order to work on JSword, you will want to connect to CVS and download 
the most recent changes. I recommend using Eclipse 3. They are at 
release candidate 3 and will be at 5 by June 25. I expect that on the 
28th that 3.0 will be released.

I have been helping for the last 6 months and the automated JUnit 
testing has been left by the wayside. Further the build (via ant) that 
does the testing is broken.

And there is very little useful documentation. The application has no 
user documentation and the JSword and Common projects should have a lot 
of documentation if they would be useful to an development community.

The problem that I see with doing either of these is that they are hard 
to maintain once they are done, unless the product is mature. We are 
nearing 1.0 so the code is changing less and less. We are pretty close 
to a 1.0 release. So I imagine that it may be something that can be 
tackled at this time. And be of real value.

Another area that needs attention is data quality. The various books 
(Bibles, Commentaries, Dictionaries and Reading Lists) are encoded in 
different ways. These are parsed and converted into OSIS 1.1 and then
transformed into HTML for display using XSLT. The transformation into 
OSIS is problematic. Sometimes the data is bad. Sometimes it is parsed 
incorrectly. Sometimes it is transformed incorrectly or inappropriately. 
  It would be helpful to fix these. After 1.0, we will look at upgrading 
to OSIS 2.0. A gotcha I see here is that verse markers might not 
surround their verse and a verse marker may mark more than one verse.

Another unaddressed problem is BiDi text, [Bi-Directional] (e.g. 
displaying Hebrew from right to left). Currently the text displays in 
the correct order but the verses are displayed from left to right. The 
net effect is that the verse numbers are on the left of the verse and if 
two verses could fit on a single line, the second verse would be on the 
right, when it should be on the left. Further, annotations/notes 
probably should be on the left margin, but they are on the right.

I am working on internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) 
support and am nearly done with that.

Let us know what you decide so we can collaborate better.

Eric Hartwell wrote:
> Hello all, 
> 
> I'm working on my grad degree in CS and I want to use it, in part, to 
> contribute to the open-source community. I've had it on my heart to work on 
> (or around) the Sword project. I thought JSword would be ideal since Java is  
> a large part of the training I'm going through. 
> 
> Please let me know where I can get started. At this point I have just a drop 
> of Java knowledge, so somethings around feature testing or documentation 
> maintenace might be more suitable. 
> 
> thanks and God bless, 
> 
> Eric Hartwell
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