[sword-devel] Creating a "SWORD-over-network" protocol for remote SWORD repo access?

[Aaron Rainbolt]

On Sat, Aug 3, 2024 at 5:30 AM Jaak Ristioja <jaak at ristioja.ee> wrote:
>
> On 29.07.24 11:10, Aaron Rainbolt wrote:
> > The idea is to make it so that *existing* SWORD clients can be able to
> > access data on remote servers without downloading the whole thing. I
> > laid out some reasons why this is helpful in certain use cases in my
> > first email. Existing SWORD clients are meant to retrieve information
> > from libsword and then render it in somme way, thus to maximize the
> > possibility of adoption, my hope was to implement in libsword the
> > ability to fetch "raw" data from a remote server and then pass it
> > through to the client, which already has code for rendering it however
> > the client chooses. Ideally a client should need to do nothing more
> > than point an SWMgr object at the remote server and then use it exactly
> > the same way it would use a local repository (perhaps with some extra
> > error checks for things like timeouts, interrupted connections, and
> > whatnot).
>
> In my opinion, this is not worth the effort. Is it really too much for
> the client to download the whole module(s) to some temporary storage or RAM?

Depending on the module, yes. I've worked on Internet connections that
were so slow that module downloads repeatedly timed out and failed. If
I am using a SWORD client that has access to remote data, I don't want
to have to wait thirty seconds to switch modules, and have some
modules just outright refuse to work. I want to be able to work almost
as fast and seamlessly as if I had the modules locally. Also for
someone who used a lot of modules in their study, having these modules
be temporarily downloaded on the fly could consume a lot of RAM or
disk space (which may be a problem for users who are stuck with
underpowered hardware), and they would have to be repeatedly
downloaded every time they opened the client. For someone working with
a modern laptop on gigabit WiFi, this might be comfortable, but for
the person in (for instance) Africa working with a 32-bit Celeron on a
dialup connection, this is not going to work.

> Also, how do you envision this to work with existing SWORD clients?

Ideally when making an SWMgr object, they could just pass a URL to the
object pointing it to the remote repository, then use it as if it were
local. Listing all modules would give you a list of all remote
modules, fetching parts of a module would fetch them from a remote
server, etc. For the client, it should be totally transparent except
for the initial connection, and error handling in the event of a
network issue.

> Best regards,
> Jaak
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