[sword-devel] modules to relational database

[lumin8]

Thanks to everyone who has shared ideas on this thread.

Of course I do not want to reinvent the wheel.  I am also very
interested in community development.  Over the years, I have been
humbled by my own ability.  Pie in the sky ideas never get realized in
the reality that I am only one developer.  Lately I have been trying
to keep it as simple as possible.

I have in mind a simple web application.  A wiki like interface for
taking notes on scripture and connecting to other notes and areas of
scripture.  If I had a relational database of say the KJV and WEB
translations, I could have a working version of this in a few hours
using Ruby and the Rails api.

But there are other considerations.  I don't want to take the fruit of
all the work dozens of engineers and contribute nothing myself, so
maybe I should spend my time learning c++ and building Ruby bindings
to the Sword api.

I have some questions though.  What happens if I add social networking
features and this site comes under heavy use (unlikely), would the
Sword API be able to act as a data server behind several web servers?
Maybe that's a less important question.

Here is a more realistic question:  Does the Sword api have a way to
directly key off of verses in scripture?  If I want to create a note
and link it to a specific verse, does that verse have a unique id or
is my foreign key going to look like ' john.3:16'?

Thirdly, where is the api documentation?  I have looked at this:
http://www.crosswire.org/sword/develop/swordapi/
and this:
 http://www.crosswire.org/sword/develop/swordapi/apiprimer.jsp

Is there a list of features telling me what is the Sword api is
actually capable of?  Lots of people mentioned some really neat stuff,
but I don't see it on the website.

I tried following the directions to build sword but it failed
complaining about automake.  'apt-get install automake'.  Then it
wanted version 1.6.  Lets see, 1.4 installed by default.  1.7, 1.8,
1.9 are available.  I installed  1.9 as well.  Now it fails unable to
find a make file.

I think i have a lot of homework to do before I can play with this stuff.

What is the best way to go about getting into this and eventually contributing?

Thanks,
nathan



 On 11/7/06, DM Smith <dmsmith555 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  Nathan,
>
> My 2 cents on the entire thread.
> There are several fundamental parts of a database application:
>
> 1) Indexed lookup: Given a key, return some data. Nothing will beat
> the simplicity of Sword's api.
>
>  2) Metadata and text search: Given a search criteria, find all data
> that satisfies the query. Given that the vocabulary of the data is
> fairly well defined, the optimized search engines of Sword cannot be
> beat. And the API is very simple.
>
> 3) Preparing the result set for viewing. This may require a specific
>  target such as rtf or html and may be filtered to show or hide
> metadata or extra data and may be stylized by user preference. The
> Sword engine provides all of this with a simple API.
>
> Dozens of engineers have contributed to Sword over the years. And
> likely will continue to do so. Including new ones like yourself. What
> this means if you use Sword is that with every release you get the
> improvements for free. It frees you to focus on user oriented
> features as you get to use a stable, but growing, capable API.
>
> In Him,
>         DM
>
>
>
>
> On Nov 6, 2006, at 4:36 PM, lumin8 wrote:
>
> > I am interested transferring a couple of the Sword bible and lexicon
>  > modules into a relational database (mysql most likely) for my own
> > indexing purposes.
> >
> > Is there already a tool available that can move the data over?  If
> > not, what would be the best way of accomplishing this?
> >
> > Thanks so much,
> > nathan
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