I'm not going to debate anyone's specific views on Open Source and/or Java development. I'll just put to you all what I think and you can take it for what it's worth.
I am an Open Source advocate. I am not a good evangelist, with either truth that I believe (The Gospel of Christ and Open Source for those that may not have put that together). But I believe whole heartedly in both and desire to use the talents, skills, and gifts available to me to further them. I also have thoughts and opinions on the roles, as I see them, for Open Source and commercial software in the future. But this is probably not the right place to share them now. In regards to JGL. I do not think we should use this library. I have not read any compelling reason why JSword should be tied to a library that seems to be questionable at best. As I read the license, I wasn't even sure we could distribute it with JSword without obtaining permission to do so from ObjectSpace. I also got the impression that Crosswire might be in violation of the license by hosting the help and api documentation on its web site. But I am not a lawyer so I may not have understood it correctly. I would also like to raise a point about the project and its Java implementation specifically. While I agree (for the most part) that the Java API should remain as close to the original C++ API as possible (at least where it doesn't conflict with Java conventions or standards), I do NOT agree that the implementation should be mimicked. Java and C++ do things in a different way. To the best of my knowledge there is no way to directly port the code from one language to another. That is why I am trying to understand the C++ library, what it does and its intention, not just modifying the syntax so that it will compile with the Java compiler. I mention this because maybe it was important and necessary to use STL (BTW, what is that?) for C++, but it may not be necessary for Java. It may have been necessary to use a Multimap in C++ which may not be necessary in Java (I have already posed one possible solution to this challenge). This is the way I plan to code and contribute, anyway. Just my opinion, /mike -- ****************************************** Mike Dougherty -- Java Software Engineer ****************************************** Operator, please trace this call and tell me where I am.
