[sword-devel] Collaboration

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Wolfgang,
	Before addressing any of the specifics, let me first say that I would 
love to work together with you to produce free Bible software. 
CrossWire, as a community, is aimed at this purpose-- moreso than to any 
technology which we decide to use.  Know that you have our resources and 
support at your use.

	One of the driving goals for our engine is to be scalable and 
crossplatform.  I'm not sure what technology you've decided on for your 
project, but I would think C++ and Java would be at the top of the list 
in this area.

	Our engine has the beginnings of supporting OSIS markup (XML).  And 
yes, I agree with you, since there are a number of ways to encode a 
valid OSIS document, I tend to favour keeping all that logic in an 
import utility that 'normalizes' it into our preferred OSIS markup (or 
even internal extension of such).

	We have a filter mechanism in our engine that allows texts to be handed 
back to the programmer in a number a supported formats.  I'm not sure 
exactly what you mean by 'biblesoftware based on xml files', but be 
assured that you can 'ask' the engine for, at least a few, XML formats, 
currently.

	Plain, raw XML is not ideal, at least in my opinion, for our 
applications of working with data.  It's an excellent archival and 
interchange format, but for realtime interaction and processing it has 
some of these problems:

	o Many duplicated tokens (e.g. word level markup) that make file sizes 
huge, not catering to PDAs and other devices with storage limitations.

	o Top down processing to know what 'level' and other 'context' you are 
within a document, which makes segmentation retrieval and display difficult.

	It seems to me that using XML as a base document for your software will 
require many indices and other auxiliary files being build based on the 
document to allow fast retrieval and context hints.  My conclusion would 
be that, it seems, if you are going to preprocess the document anyway, 
it might be best to use a compressed, or otherwise optimized format 
suited to your software needs.  Preserving the original XML document 
doesn't seem to be beneficial.

	And obviously, that's the road we've gone down.  We know the value of 
XML, and hopefully have found it's place in our software.

	Having said all of this, I just want to restate, we would LOVE to 
colabor with you for our Lord!  We definitely NEED someone to own the 
OSIS import support and other XML processing tasks in the engine.

	Thank you for your consideration and God's best to you in your 
endeavours for Him, where ever He leads you,

		-Troy.

schultz wrote:
> 
> 
> Martin Gruner schrieb:
> 
>> Wolfgang,
>>
>> I am curious. Why are you trying to create an alternative to Sword 
>> (True Sharp Sword) and OSIS (Zefanja)? Is what we have to offer you 
>> not enough? Would you see any benefit in cooperation?
>>
>> Martin
>>
> 
> hello martin,
> 
> my aim is it to write biblesoftware based on xml files. I looked around 
> and have found Sword and OSIS. But it seems that Sword has no support 
> for xml files and in addition i do not like c++  :(.  Whereas  OSIS is a 
> bit overdressed for my purposes and OSIS  has one disadvantage. On can 
> create OSIS bibletexts in several variants which are valid OSIS 
> documents so we have unnecessarily to keep in mind this  in an 
> application. In particular it  is difficult to address a single verses 
> in some variants !
> 
> But for all that if i can do anything for Sword i will do it !!
> 
> 
> 
> Wolfgang Schultz
> FREE BIBLE SOFTWARE GROUP
> Theologische Initiative Freiburg
> http://www.zefania.de/
> 
> <http://dict.leo.org/?p=lURE.&search=whereas>
> 
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