From fatalglory at gmail.com Tue Sep 21 15:45:19 2010 From: fatalglory at gmail.com (Nick Watts) Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2010 22:45:19 -0000 Subject: [sword-info] HiFi Bible - Web based study tool derived from SWORD Message-ID: <4C993722.1010908@gmail.com> Announcing - the first Beta release of HiFi Bible. A web-based bible study and commentary sharing tool derived from the SWORD project. The first beta release of HiFi Bible is now available for testing on the World-Wide-Web, on my personal website, http://resplect.com/hifibible Full documentation (for administrators and developers), downloads and source code will be released in the not-too-distant future (when I get time to finish publishing it all), but for now, the actual running software is at least available to get a look at. About HiFi Bible *************** HiFi Bible started life as a project called WebSWORD. I was in the final year of my computer science degree and needed a software-engineering project to complete as part of my coursework. The university's Anglican chaplaincy (UNEchurch a.k.a St. Mark's) agreed to be my client and commissioned my proposed project around July-August 2009. I was to create a tool for tertiary level study of the bible, being sure to implement advanced features, that could be put on the web and used by students involved in their bible study sessions. I proposed to implement this tool by writing several small command-line applications using the SWORD library. I would then develop the web application in PHP, which would call these command-line applications, receive their standard output and do some post-processing before displaying to the user. This system was finished in time, I documented it and submitted it to my lecturer and received my high-distinction for the unit, as well as my bachelor's degree at the end of the year. However, there was a problem. Only mid-way through the development process did I discover that while this system of calling command line applications from PHP worked fine on my development system, it would not install and run properly on shared web-hosting environments. In effect, any church or organisation that wanted to use such a tool would have to purchase more expensive web-hosting plans, like a VPS. The resources associated with such plans are huge overkill for a small web-application like WebSWORD, and so this was somewhat infeasible and hard to justify financially. It didn't stop me submitting the project for academic credit, but in practice it would be a show stopper. I banged my head against the wall a few times over all the work that seemed to be going to waste. I began wondering if anyone else had worked on a SWORD based web-application and stumbled across SWORDWeb. This was a Java based application that was similar in concept to WebSWORD, but suffered from the same basic issue of not installing and working easily on shared hosting. I took a job as a ministry-trainee at the Anglican chaplaincy in 2010, and continued using WebSWORD on my home computer for all of my own bible-study preparation, it came out as an excellent tool. Gradually, more and more friends started noticing this software I was using over my shoulder and asking where this website was so they could give it a try. I became determined not to let this work on WebSWORD go to waste. And so I contrived a plan to begin developing again. I determined to create an export tool that would read the content of entire SWORD project modules and dump the content HTML out to SQL files that could be easily stored in a MySQL database. Then I would port the back-end functionality of WebSWORD to access content from the database rather than from command-line SWORD applications. By doing this, the software could be easily installed and configured on any standard XAMP stack and used on just about any low-end web hosting plan. After a few months of very busy weekends and lot of empty soft-drink cans, I was nearly finished the porting process. Given that SWORDWeb existed as a similar project, with a similar name, I decided that a name change was necessary for clarity. The emphasis of this software in my mind was to particularly allow easy study of the bible in the original languages, because I strongly believe that the bible is the inspired word of God, and needs to be preserved with the utmost faithfulness (fidelity) for future generations. Hence the name, HiFi Bible. The software is released under the GNU GPL version 3 and is distributes with a collection of public domain modules (since republishing of copyrighted modules raises a lot of issues, which I will leave with individual users to deal with, with the particular publishing bodies relevant to their own intentions), as well as the KJV2003 which Crosswire has granted a general public license for. Glory to God, -Nick Technical Appendix ****************** HiFi Bible uses an SQL database backend, the content for which is generated by scraping and dumping the content of SWORD modules. The modules I have put on the demonstration installation are all public domain (except the KJV2003, which is under a general public license "for any purpose"), so I see no reason why this should cause any particular issue. However, it may be that Crosswire has a problem with the creation of such conversion tools. If any Crosswire staff are reading this and would like to comment on such issues, please do so. The conversion tools are not published anywhere on the web at this time, because I do not want to create any hostility. The derived SwordSQL format is not in any way a replacement for the SWORD module format and represents a decrease in information content from the original SWORD modules.