[jsword-devel] webstart

[DM Smith]

Well, I am in the process of adding the ability to pull the lessons out 
of the jar. And I have run into a snag.

I was hoping that I could get a directory as a resource from a jar and 
then get the children of that directory. I am still working on it, but 
it does not look too promising.

If we know the name of the jar and the location of the jar, we can treat 
it as a zip file and then get all the lessons.

I may take the cheap way out for the time being and zip up the lessons 
and put the zip into the jar. Then at program startup, extract the zip 
and unzip it to a known location, if it has not been done already.

I love a challenge and probably will find a solution to my original 
idea, sometime.

Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
<snip/>

>
>
> The jar idea is kindof cool, and I like the fact that we can let users 
> created new lessons with the editor, and they will be found, as well 
> as the lessons found in our lesson.jar that we ship.  That's really 
> cool.  In fact, since we started the svn project, we've moved the 
> lessons into subdirectories based on the Greek textbook from which 
> they were organized. So it would be really cool to have a Black.jar, 
> Mounce.jar, etc.

I would like to recommend that each set of lessons has a manifest, whose 
name is well known and it would contain the basic information about the 
lessons. Specifically, it would map a file name to a lesson name, rather 
than having both the file name and the lesson name embedded in the 
lesson file.

I was considering what it would take to internationalize the program. 
With regard to each lesson, the words, don't change from one end user's 
language to another, but the answers do. So if we put the words and the 
answers in separate files then the answers could be easily i18ned.

One thing is that Java has excellent I18N support for resources held in 
*.properties files. So the lessons should have the "properties" 
extension, instead of flash.

But that is for another day. (If I work on it, then after JSword 1.0)

>
> I was worried about the setup tab getting too large as we continues to 
> add new lessons.  Maybe we could have a dropdown list at the top for 
> the student to choose the active resource bundle (of course, more 
> aptly named for the end user)


As for the GUI, if there are multiple lesson sets then I think that a 
listing of the sets in one list and the contents in another list (which 
supports multi-select) would work well. Otherwise, have just the list of 
lessons.

At this point, I am going to leave it as is.

>
>     -Troy.
>
>
> PS.  That code is a pretty quick hack.  My apologies for it not being 
> cleaner.  It was speedily written out of utility to help me pass a 
> cumulative vocab test last semester.  The editor components were 
> written for the Hebrew Codex Leningradensis Project (Project eL from 
> SBL and Westminster Hebrew Institute) a few years back.
>
> The download stats for Flashcards is suprising.  I think we were 
> averaging about 25 downloads a day or something for a few months.  
> Haven't looked recently.

Is there a way that Crosswire could have a page that lists the number of 
downloads of each of the applications, like it is done for the modules?

>
> Thanks again for your help.  Excited about seeing anything further we 
> might produce from this!
>
>     -Troy.
>
>
>
> On Fri, 3 Sep 2004, Joe Walker wrote:
>
>