[silpa-discuss] Announcing the SILPA dictionary client for Android 2.2

[Ashik Salahudeen]

The News
=======

Rajiv wrote an Android 2.2 client for looking up meaning of words using Silpa dictionary service ( http://silpa.org.in/Dictionary ). It currently supports only the English-Malayalam and English-Hindi dictionaries though, but works well enough for daily usage.

Yes - you can read the meanings in Malayalam even though Android 2.2 doesn't support Malayalam rendering. 


Rajiv's blog post : http://www.rajivnair.in/2011/03/announcing-silpa-indic-languages.html
My blog : http://aashiks.in/blog/?p=182 

Install
====
An APK is available at these locations.

http://aashiks.in/SilpaDictionary.apk 

https://github.com/rajivnair/Silpa-Dictionary-Android-client/blob/master/Silpa%20Dictionary.apk

Install it by browsing the site through your phone and clicking on the link or by downloading the APK into your phone's storage and opening it from the phone.

Please report bugs at : https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/silpa/


How it works
=========

It uses SILPA project's dictionary service to retrieve meanings as rendered images. Internally, the dictionary module makes use of the Script rendering module (which is still under development) to generate an image of the word's meaning.

Hack
====
The code for the android client is available in Rajiv's Github : https://github.com/rajivnair/Silpa-Dictionary-Android-client 

Official SILPA code repo is available at http://gitorious.org/silpa/silpa 

Credits
=====

Android client written by Rajiv R Nair, long time SMC member, co-author of  Freedom Toaster software, fellow FOSS enthusiast 

Vasudev Kamath ( http://vasudevkamath.blogspot.com/ )  , contributor and maintainer of  SILPA project, for advice and help in committing and pushing code to Silpa server.

Santhosh Thottingal ( http://thottingal.in ) , founder of SILPA project and long time SMC contributor, for constant  support and advice.

Anish NL ( http://www.aneeshnl.co.cc )  SMC member, FOSS lover,  fixed a showstopper bug in the SILPA dictionary module

Ashik Salahudeen (http://aashiks.in/blog ) -  wrote a few lines of code in SILPA to hook together the existing modules on server side to make Rajiv's job easier.


SILPA project's new features
=====================

For those interested in actual details of the changes in SILPA : 

- A small function ( getdef_image) that calls the script rendering module with the word's meaning was written in the dictionary module. This returns an image URL.

- The SILPA dictionary module now supprts a GET method , that will invoke the above function and set the image URL as the content, with an HTTP redirect header. Thus anyone trying to do a GET with the following parameters will be redirected to the image.

The GET of the dictionary module's URL with the following request variables are supported:

   Required ( Omitting any of these results in a server error )
   =========================================

  image : if set to "y", a rendered image(png) of the word is retrieved. Else meaning in Unicode text will be retrieved.
  text: word whose meaning is to be looked up
  dict: the string that denotes the dictionary to be used. ( refer the SILPA Dictionary module for list of values)
 
  Optional ( Supported only when image is set to "y", needs more testing)
  ====================================================

  imagewidth ( defaults to 300 )
  imageheight ( defaults to 200 )
  fontsize ( defaults to 12 )

eg: http://silpa.org.in/Dictionary?image=y&text=freedom&dict=en-ml&imagewidth=500&imageheight=500&fontsize=16


Do download and test :)

-- 
aashik