[jsword-devel] Forking JSword

[Chris Burrell]

Hi  DM

Good to hear from you. I haven't added a huge amount to JSword or StepBible
in the last few years, having stepped away for various personal reasons.
But various folk have taken over the mantle. David IB hopefully is still on
this list and could have them subscribe if they're not already.

I'm very happy to jump on a call to discuss various bits and happy to
review any major diffs/features in Step that could be worth bringing in.

My one piece of feedback, if I recollect well, is that the current
mechanisms of extracting the Bible were mostly XML or HTML/ XSLT formats.
Going forward, exposing a Json format or even simply POJO format could be
highly beneficial.  As computing power has increased exponentially, having
an abstraction layer wouldn't be an enormous issue I suspect. Don't know
enough about AndBible/Android constraints though I believe the STEP app
that came about after my time loads scripture in JSON format into the
sqllite database (or at least used to?). Effectively, the rendering could
be split perhaps from the underlying data extraction? I may be
misremembering though. Browsers are way more performant these days and a
lot of native apps also use browser/Json rendering. My one larger regret
with STEP is that it returns a big html field as part of a wider Json body
where we expect all the metadata during the xslt processing. Had I spent
more time (and had the experience at the time), I would do a lot more
rendering in the browser and it would have simplified a lot of things..

I'll put a few more thoughts into this and get back to you if more comes up.

Hope the above makes sense though..

On Tue, 14 Jan 2025, 19:53 DM Smith, <dmsmith at crosswire.org> wrote:

> Hi all
>
> I’ve recently retired and as a New Year’s Resolution, will be working on
> JSword and later BibleDesktop. In my absence in the last 10 years (it
> really has been that long!), AndBible and STEPBible forks of JSword have
> had many commits. The main JSword repository has had some changes. During
> this time AndBible has incorporated many of the STEPBible changes, but is
> not current with the STEPBible changes.
>
>
>
> I would like for us to reconcile these differences, if possible. Also
> adding lead developers from AndBible and STEPBible as committers to the
> JSword repository, so that going forward a single code base can be
> maintained.
>
> I’ve been spending 2+ hrs a day for a while now on this. Evaluating but
> not making changes.
>
> Right now AndBible is a little bit behind the master JSword repository.
> Mostly, the changes are a few pull requests that I just applied. There are
> a couple more, but they have conflicts. And 2 should be evaluated for
> impact to AndBible and STEPBible.
>
> Right now, JSword is compatible with Java 7, which is no longer supported.
> AndBible still has a need to support Java 7/8 for 2% of their user base.
> STEP and BibleDesktop aren’t limited. It’d need to be changed to compile
> with Java 9 or later, even if no new language features are used.
>
> The most recent Ant, requires Java 11. Running Ant with Java 11 but
> building with Java 8 shouldn’t be a problem.
>
> Many of the dependencies of JSword can be readily updated to the latest
> and greatest. Lucene and Apache HTTP Components are exceptions.
>
> Feedback is appreciated.
>
> In His Service,
>         DM
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>
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