This site has been a little quiet of late. With one thing and another over the summer I’ve not had opportunity to invest much time in the OfflineBible. However, things are still ticking over in the background. It may have been a while in coming, but I’ve hit a major milestone and thought that it was worthy of a quick post.
Last night I finally managed to get text searches working, albeit on a very primitive basis. There are still a good number of updates I have to make to the UI (not least to support the new search functionality), but I’m hoping to have it online in the next couple of weeks. Why has it taken so long? Because I wanted it to be FAST.
- Every English word in the Bible is indexed and assigned a unique number
- There is a lookup table which lists every word number against every verse it occurs in, and the number of occurrences in the verse
- Both these tables are now created by the installer
- The lists are understandably pretty huge so I had to rethink the way that I was installing the data to make it more efficient
- By my estimates, the whole install is about 6Mb pipe-weight (content is g-zipped with PHP) or 75Mb on disk
Although I’ve not had time to test extensively, the search appears to be easily as fast as any other study software I’ve used. Once I’ve put some more work into the search GUI I’ll post another update.