[sword-devel] virtual modules

[DM Smith]

Chris Little wrote:
> We've got a number of what you might call "virtual modules" either 
> implemented or desired. I can't speak of other frontends, but BibleCS 
> has a "PARALLEL" tab, used to present multiple versions interlinearly. 
> I've recently implemented a "NOTES" tab in BibleCS that pulls any 
> footnotes in the selected translation and places them in a tab in the 
> commentary window. (This was basically for the NET Bible, so that we 
> can have a translation & its notes in separate windows, but driven by 
> a single module--the way OSIS was meant to be encoded. Now there's 
> also talk of a word-by-word verse diff tool, which could likewise be 
> presented in its own tab--on par with other modules.
>
> The question I would pose is: does any one have feelings, one way or 
> another, of pushing all of this code from the frontends back into the 
> API? What I envision is a virtual module that, when polled for a 
> specific key, constructs the result from other existing modules using 
> (more or less) the same interface as existing modules. Thus new 
> frontends and existing ones that don't have the functionality get it 
> for free.
If I get a vote, seeing that I am a java programmer, maintaining a 
separate API, I say put it in the API. A frontend is not obligated to 
use it and could roll its own. So I guess that the other question is 
whether other frontends would use it?

I also suggest that this virtual module be expressed as OSIS regardless 
of what the underlying encoding.