[jsword-devel] Update

[DM Smith]

Not really. Several reasons:
1) FTP would block when firewalled. To solve this problem we have gone 
from ftp to http tunneling.

2) The users have requested that we show the transfer size of each 
module in the list of modules that can be downloaded. This is to be 
retained and shown offline.

W/ ftp the nlst command provides the directory listing which is not 
standardized, but is fairly predictable. The apache FTP utilities that 
we did use have a way of doing the parsing that is fairly robust. When 
it does not work, the programmer can supply a custom parser. With http 
we would need to roll our own. Doing a directory listing and parse of an 
directory via http is even more variable.

3) We can get the download size of each module by opening a connection 
to each of the modules and asking that connection for the content 
length. Iterating over the list of modules to get the size puts a 
resource hit on the server and on the client. That is, the FTP NLST 
command is a single command to the server. While this iteration would be 
once per module. We would cache it when mods.d.tar.gz is gotten. So it 
would be relatively infrequent. If BibleDesktop gets a lot of users then 
this may become a problem.

Troy A. Griffitts wrote:

> Regarding the size of each module,  the other frontends transfer the 
> files via FTP not HTTP, so they have the size available to them.  
> Maybe this helps.
>
>     -Troy.
>
>
>
> DM Smith wrote:
>
>> Glad you had a good holiday.
>>
>> I like your Dad's idea.
>>
>> I went on one this weekend and showed BibleDesktop to everyone I 
>> could. For the most part the response was polite (they don't do 
>> personal Bible Study).
>>
>> I did get some good feedback. Most of the machines were 128M ram on 
>> dialup. This produced two distinctly different problems.
>> First the size: Our program is run with -mx512M. This seemed to cause 
>> a lot of disk thrashing. I had upped it to 512M because indexing 
>> caused out of memory problems. It may be worthwhile to revisit this 
>> once Lucene replaces ser.
>>
>> WRT dialup, I had forgotten how painful it is. When running a fresh 
>> installation of BD over dialup some "issues" came up:
>> The initial screen asks whether bibles should be installed. (This is 
>> fine.) When the user selects one and clicks on install (once they 
>> figure out to load the index [which is already in our list of things 
>> to do]) the program seems to hang. There is no progress meter. (It is 
>> on the main window which is not shown yet). And it takes a long long 
>> time, without warning.
>>
>> So, here are some possible solutions (some are requests that other's 
>> made):
>> Show a progress meter.
>> Show the sizes of each of the modules (I don't think that this is 
>> that easy.) Right now the only way I see is to do an http directory 
>> listing and parsing the page. This is really ugly and easily broken 
>> by server changes. I wonder if it would be possible to have it added 
>> to the confs. (Troy, can you answer this?)
>> Show an estimate of the time it will take and ask the user to confirm 
>> the download. (When the mods.d.tar.gz is downloaded, we can time it 
>> and use it for computing an estimated download rate.) This dialog 
>> could be conditional, either a checkbox "Don't ask me again. Just do 
>> it" or noticing the user has broadband and not putting up the dialog 
>> (e.g. the estimated download time is < 15 seconds, or something like 
>> that)
>> If we can monitor the download by noticing the number of bytes 
>> transferred and compare that against the expected total bytes, we 
>> could have a determinate progress meter.
>> Add a cancel button and do a cleanup of an incomplete download.
>>
>>
>> Joe Walker wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Back again - good holiday.
>>> I've had a brief conversation with Mark about Scarab and bug systems
>>> and we agree that Scarab is not complete enough. I've spoken to
>>> Atlassian about Jira and they've granted us a free license! So I'll
>>> install that fairly soon.
>>>
>>> My dad has been having a go with BibleDesktop and his comment was that
>>> we should add the ability to search for strongs numbers. He said a
>>> search he commonly wanted was along the lines show me where word X is
>>> not translated as Y, which could be as simple as "H1045 -love". I'm
>>> not sure how Lucene copes with multiple indexes, but it might be
>>> something worth bearing in mind.
>>>
>>> Joe.
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> jsword-devel mailing list
>>> jsword-devel at crosswire.org
>>> http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/jsword-devel
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> jsword-devel mailing list
>> jsword-devel at crosswire.org
>> http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/jsword-devel
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> jsword-devel mailing list
> jsword-devel at crosswire.org
> http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/jsword-devel
>