[sword-devel] Re: GUI interfaces

[Chris Little]

Been there.  Done that. :)  But apparently we haven't promoted it
enough, possibly because screenshots of term windows don't look cool on
a webpage. :)

> How does this relate to Sword?  Well, Sword is currently available to
> C++ programs.  There should be alternate interfaces for other 
> tools.  A
> simple command line tool to quote a verse by reference or 
> output a concordance like list of references given a search 
> key would be handy for a scripted web page or editor macros.  

diatheke does that.  http://www.crosswire.org/sword/diatheke/
There's also ActiveDiatheke, which will do most of the Diatheke stuff as
an ActiveX control, but this hasn't been updated since 1.5.2.

The need for a command line interface to Sword was my reason for writing
Diatheke.  It is the foundation of our CGI script, our SOAP interface
(just a slightly different CGI script), & our IRC BibleBot (type
!biblehelp in #sword on irc.openprojects.org).

> A C interface would be more easily wrapped for script 
> languages like Python or Perl.

Correct me if I'm wrong (and I probably am) but don't we keep all the
public interefaces accesible to C?

> A command line tool would 
> also let you search the Scriptures on a 4Mb 386 in console 
> mode (although an ncurses frontend would be nicer for that).

We have an ncurses frontend also
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/irenaeus), but it's about 10 months
since its last release and I'm not sure if it's being maintained any
more.  Perhaps someone would like to take this project over if its
author isn't maintain it anymore?  Once the transliterator stuff in ICU
is finished, it should be a nice interface interface for any of our
modules.

--Chris