JSword - Free Bible Study Software

The JSword Project is a group of free programs that work together to bring Bible study to a wide range of people using the Java platform. It includes Bible Desktop, a free desktop based Bible study tool.

Since it is written in Java (JDK 1.4) it will run on most computers. Currently we regularly test on Windows, Linux and MacOS X, but it ought to work on Solaris and other places where JDK 1.4 or higher is available, and could be easily extended to work on set-top boxes and PDAs.

The software produced by the JSword project is open source software so it is freely available to anyone. It is licensed under the LGPL for the libraries and GPL for the application.

There are several components to the JSword project, the most commonly used is Bible Desktop. The core API is called JSword and there are two generic libraries of useful utilities called common and common-swing. For a complete listing see instructions on getting the code.

How to find out more

The Webstart download of Bible Desktop is the best place to get started which is available on the Bible Desktop download page.
There are also binary and source downloads available from the JSword download page. You can download Sword modules from here. There is a page of screenshots showing what BibleDesktop looks like (a program built with JSword), and a page of recent news. and there is a list of the changes that have taken place in each of the released versions.

How to get involved

On the right there are links to pages explaining SVN access, work in progress, the outline design and with links to JavaDocs, JUnit reports, source on the web etc. Get involved here.

Other Projects

We've piggy backed on a whole lot of other projects which we are very grateful to.

	The CrossWire Bible Society is an organization with the purpose to sponsor and provide a place for engineers and others to come and collaborate on free, open-source projects aimed at furthering the Kingdom of our God. CrossWire is a non-income organization, which means that not only do we offer our services for free, but we also do not solicit donations to exist. We exist because we, as a community come together and offer our services and time freely.
	Atlassian supports our efforts by contributing JIRA, their bug tracking and issue tracking application, to our project. JIRA is developed to track and manage the issues and bugs that emerge during a project. Try it for yourself.
	Jakarta Lucene is an open source, high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search.
	JDOM provides a solution for using XML from Java that is as simple as Java itself.