[Freecats-Dev] Re: About your existing alpha/beta software [test]

[Henri Chorand]

Hi all,

Yesterday, I sent 2 messages on the list, but I did not see them in my
mailbox.

So, I'll post them again, in case I'm more lucky this time.


Cheers,

Henri

----- Message d'origine -----
De : "Henri Chorand" <address@hidden>
À : "Free CATS Dev List" <address@hidden>
Envoyé : mardi 14 octobre 2003 18:47
Objet : Re: About your existing alpha/beta software


> Hi Dan,
>
> > Okay, I'm now registered in Savannah as durist.
>
> Fine. You are enrolled by now ;-)
>
>
> > > Considering the problems associated with Sun's attitude towards free
> > > software, I believe that, ideally, we should try to avoid being too
much
> > > tied to their tools.
> > >
> > > As I see it, the best would be to use your plug-in for the translation
> > > client's interface, and then, beyond, to rely on other, fully free and
> fully
> > > portable tools. We thought about Python because of this (and its ease
of
> > > 1° learning, 2° mixing with other code).
> > >
> > > This means you would split your project into two parts:
> > > - The OO interface, which will interest all the translators in the
team
> and
> > > discussion list. You can expect some feedback on it.
> > > - The "under the hood" part, which may evolve separately, possibly be
> > > gradually rewritten in another language...
> >
> > This is already how it's designed. Currently, the front-end is a set of
> > OOo Basic macros, which talk to a SOAP server written in perl. The java
> > piece is the web-services extension for OOo; it has nothing to do with
> > the server. OpenOffice uses java as its primary extension language;
> > there is no way to get around that.
>
> This is mostly good news.
> It would still work if we were to go along with Python, as the latter is,
I
> believe, accessible from a Java program (to be confirmed, the opposite is
> OK).
>
>
> > Is java going to be a problem for hosting it on Savannah?
> > There's a bit on the registration page
> >
>
(https://savannah.gnu.org/faq/?group_id=11&question=What_is_the_registration
> _process.txt)
> > that says:
> >
> > No dependencies to non free software
>
> I think it's all right (not forbidden). As you probably know, the projects
> admission criteria are quite strict on Savannah, which is also why I was
> quite happy to see this project accepted at once.
>
> I did a quick search with "Java" on:
> http://savannah.nongnu.org/search/
> and a number of projects appeared.
> The proof is in the pudding.
>
>
> > There is an INSTALL file in the distribution; but it's still fairly
> complex.
> >
> > > As far as we can see it, fuzzy indexing and matching being all but an
> exact
> > > science, even a crude solution will be quite enough during prototyping
> > > stages, and may evolve at its own path (adding "weird" (for Western
> people)
> > > languages is not forgotten).
> >
> > I think it also depends on how large a data set you're working with; a
> > crude solution probably works okay until you have a really large
> > translation memory. It seems to me that much of the value added by the
> > better TM products is in editing convenience rather than linguistic
> > cleverness. Currently my server uses a perl module called
> > String::Similarity
> > (http://search.cpan.org/~mlehmann/String-Similarity-0.02/Similarity.pm
> > if you're interested in how it works); I have no idea how well it would
> > scale.
>
> I lack skills to discuss this further, but I'm confident we won't have too
> many such problems, at least while we follow a strictly modular approach.
>
>
> > I hope to have an improved version of OOxlate out soon; I'm adding a
> > generic RDBMS backend (it will still work with plain files, but will
> > easily scale up if you stick a real database behind it).
>
> That's great. Flat files are OK, actually; the only issue would be fast
> search (and indexing). I do hope you get a quick feed-back from Tim on
this.
>
> In the list's archive, you will find a few threads about our file formats.
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Henri
>