STEP using Crosswire

>>> Dear Chris & David (& Troy)

>>> Troy: Please let me introduce you to Chris and David who are
>>> struggling, with a little input from me, to find a database engine
>>> for STEP.

>>> Chris & David: Let me introduce Troy Griffitts - he's the genius
>>> behind the CrossWire project, and the one who developed its
>>> standalone database, as well as the OSIS structure for Scripture
>>> texts. The datasets from Crosswire will be extremely important in
>>> STEP, and ideally we'd like to use the CrossWire search engine if we
>>> can link it to a web interface. Troy had some cool ideas about how
>>> to do this which, admittedly, I didn't fully understand when he
>>> 'explained' them to me.
>>> Troy: As you'll see from the messages below, we've been thinking
>>> about the issue of providing a database which will run on maximum
>>> number of platforms with minimum installation and no internet
>>> connection.
>>> We have come up with the following ideas
>>> * installing MySQL or something like PostgreSQL with Apache using
>>> something like XAMPP or EasyPHP, or on its own (see here
>>> <
>>> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/windows-install-archive.html >) .
>>> * creating a virtual machine image containing all the software we
>>> need using something like the free
>>> < http://www.vmware.com/products/player/>VMware player
>>> < http://www.vmware.com/products/player/>
>>> * using Gears APIs
>>> * use JPC - a java x86 emulation which runs inside Browsers (now
>>> open source - see here
>>> < http://javafanatics.blogspot.com/2007/03/jpc-project.html>)
>>> I don't really know enough about the Crosswire materials to know
>>> what would work best.
>>> We don't have to use the Crosswire engine - we could just extract
>>> the data - but it would certainly save time to use an engine
>>> Crosswire has already developed.
>>> We don't want to access only the Crosswire materials. We will need
>>> to create several flat-file databases, so we'll have to think about
>>> whether these should be entirely separate or whether to incorporate
>>> them into the Crosswire engine.
>>> What do you think, Troy?
>>>
>>> David IB