[jsword-devel] Update on JSword

[DM Smith]

On 10/05/2009 04:10 PM, Manfred Bergmann wrote:
>
> Am 05.10.2009 um 14:22 schrieb DM Smith:
>
>> On Oct 5, 2009, at 9:09 AM, Manfred Bergmann wrote:
>>
>>> Hi.
>>>
>>> I think switching to Java 1.5 is a good decision.
>>> As you said Java 1.5 is available for Mac OSX 10.4 and AFAIR this 
>>> was the only door stopper.
>>>
>>> Then it would also be nice to get Generics in JSword.
>>>
>>> What actually is missing to bring JSword up to speed with C++ Sword?
>>
>> The biggest things: av11n and ability to write modules (which 
>> supports personal commentary). We probably should add FTP back in. 
>> (Try to use HTTP first and on failure go to FTP automatically)
>
> av11n I think is too big a challenge for me but I could have a look at 
> writing modules.

That sounds great. I'll tackle the av11n. It will be hard.

> AFAIHS the low-level stuff is in jsword-sword and I guess here is the 
> actual writing code to be implemented?
The implementation will be in JSword. I can point you to the classes 
that will need to change and I can document the layout of the files too.

>
>>
>> I'm sure there are others, but I haven't thought about it in a long 
>> time.
>
> Did you need some distance from the project? Or were you busy with 
> other things?

I guess it was a little bit of both. I was busy with family obligations 
and work. The big family events are past and work has just eased up a 
bit. But then I just didn't get back into it.


>
>
>
> Manfred
>
>>>
>>> Am 05.10.2009 um 13:22 schrieb DM Smith:
>>>
>>>> I'm working on JSword again after a long time of not being able to.
>>>>
>>>> A couple of notes:
>>>> I've upgraded all the QA tools (e.g. findbugs, checkstyle) and in 
>>>> the process broke the nightly build. I'll fix that shortly.
>>>>
>>>> I am applying patches, fixing bugs, upgrading 3-rd party components 
>>>> and satisfying requests that others have made. I checked in a 
>>>> change for Tonny the other night. (Tonny hopefully you grabbed 
>>>> that. If not you might need to build the jars yourself.)
>>>>
>>>> If you develop on a Mac in Eclipse and have upgraded to Snow 
>>>> Leopard, you'll need to go into Preferences -> Java and delete all 
>>>> the JREs and re-add them. Without doing that, it will not let you 
>>>> run the program w/in Eclipse.
>>>>
>>>> Lucene has just released version 2.9. This is in preparation for 
>>>> the 3.0 release, with the only real difference between the two is 
>>>> that deprecations are being removed. The second minor difference is 
>>>> that 3.0 will require Java 5 as it is introducing Generics into the 
>>>> API (supposedly in a backward compatible, drop-in the new jar, kind 
>>>> of way. We'll see.) I'm working on upgrading to it. Lots has 
>>>> changed internally. The impact to JSword is that our lucene search 
>>>> indexes will need to be rebuilt, requiring us to finish their 
>>>> versioning and handling a version difference in the front-ends.
>>>>
>>>> Speaking of Snow Leopard for Mac OSX. Our policy has been to 
>>>> support old OSes for a long time, but not forever. I.E. the current 
>>>> and two prior. Soon we'll be dropping support for Panther, which 
>>>> came out 6 years ago this month. (A year and a half ago Panther was 
>>>> on 23% of all Macs.) This will happen when we go to Lucene 3.0 and 
>>>> Java 5. (Note: Tiger does not install Java 5 but it is available 
>>>> for install. We'll need to provide notes.) I'd still like to 
>>>> release ELEPHANT (see other threads or JIRA for a description) as 
>>>> the last Java 1.4 application.
>>>>
>>>> With the new version of Lucene, I am a new method to PassageTally 
>>>> called getTotal and SearchModifier with (set/get)MaxResults. This 
>>>> optimization will give us a place to hang the total number of hits 
>>>> in a search request when the user only wants to see the top 20 or 
>>>> so. The current code would prioritize all the verses coming back 
>>>> from a search and then sort them. These results were then pruned to 
>>>> the top N verses. Lucene has now simplified how this can happen 
>>>> with its new Collector method. There is a Collector that only 
>>>> retains the hits that have a higher score than the N-th one with 
>>>> the lowest score, but counts all of them. PassageTally is at its 
>>>> best when it is small. So now only the top N are put into the 
>>>> PassageTally and the total hits are recorded.
>>>>
>>>> Lucene has also introduced new Arabic and Persian analyzers. These 
>>>> will make searches on those much nicer. I'll need some testing 
>>>> volunteers for that when I've got it all checked in.
>>>>
>>>> In His Service,
>>>>     DM Smith