The
printable manual will be your starting point as well as your reference. Please
don't hesitate to report any mistake or missing explanations,
The doxygen documentation is generated from the
source code and is a nice way of browsing and discovering the library, as well
as a convenient hyperlinked quick reference
FAQ
Usability
Can I freely use Sword in my projects ?
Yes, you can. Sword is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser Public License,
which means you can use it without restrictions in your projects (whether they
are Open Source or not). The only requirement is that you keep the copyright
notices on all the files, and that if you give out the library to someone else,
you must give all the sources and copyright information with it.
As usual with Open Source, we would appreciate if you contribute back any
changes (fixes, improvements...) that you make to the library. Also if you
use Sword in big commercial projects, we would appreciate some funds to
support the developement. On demand, we can also study consulting
to help you work with Sword.
How stable is Sword ?
You should'nt be afraid by the "beta 0.2.x" version number. All features
documented in the manual are stable and production-ready.
The library is used every day in several critical application in a demanding
production environment.
The undocumented features are not yet stable, either because their interface
will change or because they are not tested enough. When all interfaces are
stables and enough testing has been made, Sword will mature in version 1.0.0.
What are the technical requirements ?
Your software, if using Sword will also have to rely on
ACE. ACE is a very
impressive piece of software which gives you many portable concurrency and
networking classes and patterns. There was no way we could have done a better
job, so we decided to use ACE as an environment abstraction layer and to
complement with higher level or other missing features.
If you want to use GUI classes from Sword, you will have to rely on
QT as well. QT is a portable GUI
toolkit which comes for free on Unix and MacOSX, and can be bought at
a reasonable price on Windows.
Otherwise, you will need a working C++ compiler (GCC 3.2 or better,
Microsoft Visual Studio 6 or better) and we support Unix (GNU/Linux and
Solaris are tested), MacOSX and Microsoft environments (Windows 2000 is tested).