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Bible Tools

Bible Tools is a client/server program for Bible study. It's written in Python and should eventually (if not now) run everywhere Python can run. The server can even run on a separate computer, if they're connected by a TCP/IP network. You can find the current user documentation here in PDF format. Other documentation is included within the distribution package itself.

Currently there is only a command-line interface, but it's useful already either from the command line itself, or from within your favorite text editor. There are commands for loading and unloading databases as well as extracting verses or ranges of verses and searching on a string or regular expression. Another search command that performs word-oriented searches works already in rudimentary fashion, but still requires a lot of work before prime time.

New features are already started, and somewhat available for use, offer lectionary data based on the historic Christian church year. Eventually, this tool will allow the user to give a command equivalent to saying, "Give me the Epistle and Gospel lessons along with the exact date for the Sunday celebration of All Saints Day next year." Any suggestions for this interface and related functionality are welcome.

A graphical interface is planned, though it's still in the planning stages at this point. Part of the problem is that on Linux (TM), which the author uses at home, the command-line tools are almost 100% sufficient. The other part is that the author has never written a GUI nearly as ambitious as this before, and none at all in Python. It looks like wxPython (wxWindows) will be the GUI toolkit of choice. That should allow the end result to be usable across several platforms without any changes.

If you grab the CVS tree instead of downloading a distribution file, you'll get more stuff to look at. It's not all pretty, but some of it may be useful, depending on what tools and experience you have.

Here are a few links:

Project Page
This is the main project page that coordinates the various tools available for developers and users.
CVS Information
This is what you use to browse through the latest development directory tree or even download it to your own computer.

Jesse Jacobsen
Last modified: Wed Aug 14 21:57:32 2002