[jsword-devel] JSword Help Wanted?

[DM Smith]

Adam,

Another place to find ideas would be the CrossWire wiki. There we have  
a list of features for an ideal frontend:

http://www.crosswire.org/wiki/index.php/Frontends:FeatureList

This is a fairly new page and people are adding to it on a regular  
basis.

In Him,
	DM

On Jul 20, 2008, at 5:54 PM, DM Smith wrote:

>
> On Jul 20, 2008, at 3:29 PM, Adam Thomas wrote:
>
>> Hello, I have been considering contributing  to the JSword project
>> for some time, but based on looking at the development mailing list
>> archives it appears that very few bugs and enhancements are flowing
>> in.
>
> I'm working on getting 1.0.8 out the door. After that the major
> enhancement will be what I have referred to the Elephant release. It
> will add all kinds of persistence to the application. Search for
> Elephant in jsword-devel to get a description. I won't repeat it here.
>
> After the Elephant release we'll move on to 2.0.
>
>
>> Most of the messages are other projects which use JSword, announcing
>> their new releases. What bugs do come in appear to be immediately
>> resolved by DM Smith.
>
> I hope that is a compliment. I really don't want to stifle
> contributions. There's a lot that can be done.
>
> You are welcomed to figure out what would make the program more useful
> to you, discuss it here and after getting consensus, make the change.
>
> Where I started was to find bugs, report them and fix them. That
> helped me understand how the code is laid out.
>
>
>> I also am unable to view feature requests on the bug tracking
>> system, as it appears to be down now.
>
> It is down indefinitely. I am trying to bring it back up.
>
>> The bottom line is there appears to be very little development work
>> to be done from my perspective as an outsider. My question is, could
>> this project use my Java skills, or is JSword pretty much in
>> maintenance mode or doing fine with the current developer staff? If
>> my skills can be utilized, where are the feature requests and bugs
>> located so that I can get working?
>
>
>
> Just to name a few needs/wants:
>
> The various "Backends" that understand how the books (module) are laid
> out need to have the ability to write a book. The first one that needs
> to be done is the raw driver for Bibles. Once this one is done, BD can
> be changed to allow editing of the Personal Commentary. (The personal
> commentary is nothing than verse by verse notes.)
>
> In Parallel view, we need to be able to have a font per column.
> (Currently parallel view is driven by the first book's settings. ) We
> already have the ability to define fonts per language and per book, as
> well as globally. We just need to pass those into the xslt and use  
> them.
>
> In Parallel view, we need search to search all the books being viewed
> that are indexed. We also need a way to allow for a user to index the
> books that are being viewed in parallel. I think for the time being,
> the result should be unified.
>
> We need a way to highlight the hits of a resulting search request.
> (Lucene has some highlighter code in contrib that might be useful.)
>
> XSLT handling that's in BibleDestop needs to be refactored into Common
> or JSword, (probably common).
>
> In Ant, we need a way to conditionally run NSIS based upon whether it
> is present.
>
> The search engine needs a significant improvement in the handling of
> non-ascii text. Currently we index the text exactly as we get it. We
> need to also strip the accents/diacritics off and store that as well.
> In BibleDesktop, we need an "Advanced Feature" to expose that. It
> might be good to search both, meaning that the search request is
> normalized to not have accents. It may also be good to store
> transliterations. (E.g. romanizations of Chinese, Greek in English
> characters, ...)
>
> JSword should have the ability to remove cantillation from Hebrew
> text. BD should make it available.
>
> JSword should have the ability to remove accents from Hebrew and Greek
> text. BD should make it available.
>
> JSword should have the ability to transliterate in the same way that
> Win Sword does. BD should make it available.
>
> In BD, dictionaries are pretty useless (except for Strong's and
> Robinson's). We need a way to have a user right click on a word and
> get a popup of things about that word and things that they can do. One
> would be to grab the word's definition from their preferred
> dictionary. It would also be good to put Strong's Numbers and
> Morphology in to the popup, whether they are showing.
>
> For search, there are some things that can be done:
> * Add an advanced feature to expose searching Notes.
>
> * Add an advanced feature to expose searching Cross References. (I.e.
> what are all the verses that refer to a particular verse)
>
> * Add an advanced feature to expose searching of Strong's Numbers.
>
> * Add find similar. Ideally, the user would either highlight text and
> right click on it. Or right click in a verse and the popup would
> search for similar verses.
>
> * Add synonym/thesarus searching (contrib work is being done on this
> in Lucene)
>
> * Add the ability to search Strong's and Morphology at the same time
> on a word/phrase basis. (This one is hard.)
>
> For the book installer:
> Re-write as a standalone program, preferably using RCP/SWT/JFace
> rather than Swing.
>
> Add a unified view of the books from a download site, showing what is
> installed, available to install and available as an update. The
> installer should also note when a module is more recent than what is
> available from a download site. This happens when the module is in  
> beta.
>
> Add an option to check for updated modules automatically, providing a
> simple popup with the option to download them by checking them off
> from the list.
>
> Allow the user to show/hide languages that they are not interested in.
> There should be some kind of feedback that not all are showing (E.g.
> "Showing 27 of 350 available modules")
>
> The installer should be able to download a zip file directly by URL.
>
> The installer should be able to list installed books that are not
> available at any download site. On occasion there are modules that are
> removed from CrossWire. Some users make available other books that one
> might install as a zip file.
>
> The installer needs to have the ability to download via FTP (the code
> is in limbo right now. It should work). If downloading via zip does
> not work, it should fall back to FTP.
>
> Add a way that the user can filter by book feature. (e.g. show the
> books that have strong's numbers, show ThML encoded books,  ...).
>
> Hopefully something here will be of interest or be a springboard for
> an idea of your own.
>
> Working together for Christ's Kingdom,
> 	DM Smith
>
>
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