[sword-devel] SWIG for Sword!

[Joachim Ansorg]

Hi!

Some time ago I read in the TWiki of Sword, that SWIG interface files for 
Sword would be cool. I never heard about SWIG, but I decided to try creating 
the necessary interface files after I read what SWIG is.

Now I have a basic set working. I added the files to bindings/swig/. The 
Makefile is not yet working properly with the automake system, but I hope I 
can fix this soon. At the moment it's a default Makefile made on my system,  
a perl module is created.
The interface files have to be refined in future, but they're working for the 
basic things.

For the curious: With the Swig interface files I can write the following in 
perl:
--------------
$localemgr = sword::LocaleMgr::systemLocaleMgr();
$localemgr->setDefaultLocaleName("de");

$mgr = new sword::SWMgr();
$module = $mgr->module("WEB");
print "Description of module ", $module->Name(), ": \n\t", 
$module->Description(), "\n";

$key = new sword::VerseKey("Matthew 3:16");
$key->setPersist(1);
$module->SetKey($key);

for ($i = 0; $i < 15; $i++) {
  print "(", $module->KeyText() ,")\t", $module->StripText(), "\n";
  $key->next();
}

$module->write("This is a test entry! This tests the write abilities of the 
Sword Perl classes");
----------------

As you can see the API is almost like Sword's C++ API, but operators are not 
supported. I renamed them (e.g. SWModule::operator << to SWModule::write).

The last call writes into the module! I hope you find the interface files 
useful! I think we can even create bindings to Java, Phyton, Ruby etc. using 
SWIG, although I have not yet tried this.

Joachim