[sword-devel] roadmap for Windows frontend(?)

[Chris Little]

I would be interested in getting a feel for where people believe we should
head with Windows frontend development (after 1.5.6).  I'm really only
interested in realistic and feasible near-term objectives, especially from
those people who are likely to actually put work into the project.  The
reason I ask is because I would like to know where I should devote my
time.

As far as I can see, there are four roads we can take with BibleCS at the 
moment:

1. Keep doing the same as we've been doing.

2. Move to Gecko rendering with the same BibleCS codebase.

3. Develop the desktop-based prototype to match the features of the
current BibleCS codebase (and presumably add Gecko rendering).

4. Dump BibleCS development to concentrate on the wxWindows-based
frontend.



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My own hopes/feelings/vision....

I'm somewhat torn between options 2 and 3.  I feel as if it is really time
to move past RTF (ruling out option 1) and I feel that wxWindows, while a
very nice way to support multiple platforms, cannot serve the
Windows-using community as well as a Windows-specific API would (ruling
out option 4).  (wxWindows, for example, could not manage the
desktop-interface of the prototype very easily, to my knowledge.)

Personally, I wish we could dump BibleCS and do an MFC front-end in VC++ 
since that would eliminate a lot of the nonsense we put up with, having to 
essentially port 3rd party libraries from VC++ to Borland, but I don't 
think there are enough like-minded developers to support moving 
development to VC++.

So I guess my vote, out of the options I listed, would be to do option 2 
for the next release (get Gecko rendering done) then use that to really 
get started on option 3: BibleCS 2.0.

Some of the big advantages of finally moving to HTML rendering will be 
ability to produce interlinear texts that actually stack and to use CSS 
for user-customization.  With CSS, we could even toggle things like 
Strong's numbers or footnotes by a change to the CSS instead of running 
through our filters.

Thoughts/comments?

--Chris