OfficiumDivinum is an object-oriented re-write of divinumofficium. Divinumofficium is an incredible achievement: it presents the complete divine office and missal of the Roman rite from its Tridentine form through to its currently authorised version (‘rubrics 1960’), as well as a ‘monastic’ office and now the Dominican breviary. It does this with a collection of perl scripts parsing a text-based homegrown database structure and outputting html to STDOUT which is then served. That something so complicated was concieved and put together by one man is incredible. Unfortunately, it is hard to know how it works:
- Some data is stored in various (not really documented) text files, other is hard-coded into scripts.
- Some things are in funny places (for instance, the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus is assigned in the calendar to the ‘0th January’, and then moved to its variable date by the code).
- Perl is very hard to read, at least for non perl coders!
- Functions call each other in fun and non-obvious ways (at least for non perl coders!)
- It’s basically stateless, and takes the Divinum Afflatu version as the ‘default’, then to mutate it. But this occasionally has problems.
And it is hard to extend it:
- The database format (which in any case is not used for everything) is basically designed to output plaintext.
- There are no symbolic representations of e.g. days, psalms, chapters which could be traded for e.g. .gabc files to generate scores to sing from.
- Perl is hard! (Did I say that before?)
OfficiumDivinum is an attempt to address these problems by a complete re-write in a more modern idiom.
If divinumofficium did one thing, we do the opposite. This may well need correcting down the line.
- Backend
- The backend generates internal representations used by the server. The backend is written in python and is heavily object-oriented.
- Server
- The server serves this content via a REST-like (hopefully RESTfull, but that’s a contested term) API. It does this either in a format very close to the backend (a json which can be deserialised back to python objects), or html, or latex, or gabc. The API uses Flask, whilst the database is mysql.
- Frontend
- The frontend is up to you! We provide a server, you build a website, or an app, around it. But we hope to provide an example website. Since the API does the heavy lifting, the page can be simple, and embedding is easy!
We are very much in beta. For now, see the docs in api and the
testing implementation at 2e0byo.pythonanywhere.org. This server is
updated by pushes to master at this repo, so if you have push access
don’t push to master until you’re sure.
Will shortly be hosted on readthedocs.
OfficiumDivinum aims ultimately to be easy to contribute to, even for non-coders. For now, clone, edit, and open a pull request.