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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 > > _______________________________________________ > > sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org > > http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel > > Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page > > > _______________________________________________ > sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org > http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel > Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page > -- _______________________________ portland, or: 01 (503) 608-7950 cuernavaca, mx: 52 (777) 318-9094 _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
