[sword-devel] Reusing modules?

[Jon Brisbin]

I've been trying to find a bible study program that really fits me  
well and I'm having a hard time with that. Bible Desktop is great, but  
it doesn't work very well on my OS X Leopard system. The text gets  
corrupted when I scroll (I don't know if it's a bug with Apple's JDK  
or the program), so it's a pain to use. Other programs are Win-only  
and I do have VMWare, so I could run them, but I hate to boot up my  
Windows VM unless I absolutely have to. :) Logos looks interesting  
(from the screenshots), but kind of pricey and I want a different  
interface (what would be so hard about making a tree in the left pane,  
just like Mail or Thunderbird?). I've looked into writing my own, but  
I'm pretty much a one-trick pony. I'm a web developer and that's what  
I know. I've tried learning Objective-C/C++ because I've dabbled in  
normal C/C++ some, but that requires you to think in a different way  
and my early attempts at creating my own Mac Bible Study program have  
not met with much success. I'd rather not use Java because I'm a  
server-side Java programmer and haven't done hardly any GUI work in  
Java.

So what I thought I could do is write an Adobe AIR application. That's  
using technology that I already know and already have development  
tools for. The only problem with that approach is that you can't  
extend the AIR runtime with native plugins or anything. I can open  
native files, though, so I could potentially open converted modules.  
Or I could use one of the bindings and write a web-based program that  
basically converts the SWORD modules into a format that I could  
download and insert into AIR's SQLite internal database. I like this  
latter approach, as it would integrate very nicely with Adobe AIR. The  
goal is to make an application that works offline. I don't want to  
have to have a connection because, if I was to use it at church, for  
example, we don't have wireless or internet access.

But can I do that? I could probably do that for myself, but what if I  
redistributed the application? Can I redistribute modules in a  
different form? What modules would be off limits? I like using the  
ESV. I've pretty much used the NIV in print for a long time, but I  
haven't installed Accordance on my Intel Mac (which was the  
application I had that had an electronic NIV version). What are the  
restrictions on using a SWORD module in a web-based (or web-enabled)  
application?

Thanks for the info!

Jon Brisbin
http://jbrisbin.com