Bringing the bible up to date - Bible Web Services

Bringing the bible up to date. A Listing of Bible Web Services

Web 2.0 is the rubber meeting the road of all of the "web services" work that has been going on the last decade.

A brief explaination of web services:
A web page/web application is a way for a person to interact with a computer to buy something or search a database, etc.

A web service is a way for one computer to talk to another computer to buy something or search a database, or retrieve information on a particular topic, etc.

Web services got early traction in intranets and "extranets" linking up the computer systems from one company to their suppliers and even wiring together applications between departments in big companies but really didn't make a dent on the internet until recently.

Then came RSS
The syndication technology that allowed people to subscribe to someones blog. So now my blog or news reader can talk to your blog. Google and Amazon were some of the first large companies to start offering an "API" or web service interface to their information. All kinds of startups started offering api's along with actual pages to do things like bookmarking/tagging, photo sharing, calendars, etc.

So what does that mean about the word of God? Sadly, not much.
Almost all of the good Bible websites are still under the come visit my webpage and I'll sell you more "Jesus junk" model. A true bible web service could be a way for the Christian community to extend the reach of the word of God out of the Bible websites where is locked right now.

Fortunatly there are a few notible exceptions -

There are some notable exceptions - the ESV was the first major publisher to offer a web service. You can make 500 requests per day for free or get expanded use for $100 a year.

Several other hobbiest/companies have put together bible web services using public domain translations, such as the old standby KJV or the WEB bible.

Including -
WebserviceX.NET
Biblewebservice
Francis Shanahan's Bible Webservice

The ESV definately sets the bar while Michael Sumerano's Biblewebservice contribution takes a 2nd place.

So what does this mean? Cheap, easy to use bible web services are the necessary plumbing for really cool Web 2.0 applications. Bibleicio.us for instance needs full text searching and proper paragraph breaks and line breaks in it's display. To do that "right" and easily, I should use a web service, or if none is available solve that problem and make it available as a service.

That way the programmers out there could easily do cool things like make a hover over on your blog that poped up the full text of any bible references you post. A web service could allow you to easily switch to different translations/languages.

Putting my money where my mouth is.

I'm a plumbing guy, so I guess I'll start tackling this problem. I want to swich Bibleicious over to use ESV or possibly Sumerano's service (doing SOAP in php will be new territory for me). If I go the ESV route, the next step will be to create a WEB version with the same API so you can easily switch between them. With Sumerano someone needs to pay the bills - so I either need to help him pay for hosting or port his solution over to php so I can host it myself.