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                            |__/The Perl DICT Server
                                         Version 0.6

--- Introduction ---

Jiten (Japanese for 'dictionary', I hope), implements the DICT
protocol as specified in RFC 2229 by Rik Faith and Bret Martin. It
features a convinent scheme for extending its functionality, both
searching strategies and database support.

--- Strategies and Databases ---

 The default distribution provides 8 searching strategies and one useful
database handler. These are:
 * exact                                 -\
 * prefix                                 |  None of these use external
 * suffix                                 |- modules. They can be used by
 * substring                              |  anyone with Perl.
 * regular expression                    -/
 * metaphone (Text::Metaphone)           -\
 * soundex (Text::Soundex)                |- Included in the extended
 * levenshtein distance (String::Approx) -/  strategies file.

The database handler reads data in the format of Rik Faith's dictd,
except it doesn't handle compressed data. (I'll probably fix that
later by simply invoking dictzip in the next version. Slow, but, hey,
whatever)

--- Configuration File Format ---

The configuration file is made up of individual lines, each of which
contains a different directive, generally of the format:

 * directive name path args

 The directives are as follows:

 dbhandler name path
  Where name is the name of the module contained in the file pointed to by
  path.

 db name path type
  name is the abbreviated name used by the server in listings, etc, the path
  is the location of the data, dependant on the type of handler, which is
  stored in type (and corresponds to a dbhandler name)

 strat name1,name2,name3 path
  name[1,2,3] are the names of the strategies contained in the file pointed
  to by path.

--- Code interface ---

 --- Database handlers ---

Handlers are Perl modules appropriate for being tie()'d to hashes.  It
should not provide any means to change the contents of the
data. (Though, they should never be used, anyways). It should also
provide the methods 'name' and 'virtual'. The name returns a
single-line, reasonably short descriptive name of the contents of the
database. virtual should return true or false, depending on whether or
not it is a function of other databases. FIRSTKEY and NEXTKEY need
only return valid data for the key, the value will never be acquired
in this fashion. (Feel free to return whatever is most convinent and
uses the least CPU time)

Their FETCH method should return a reference to a list of definitions.
Each definition is a reference to an array containing three things,
the database it is from, the name of the entry in that database, and
the actual data.

 --- Search Strategies ---

Search Strategies are functions, whose names are of the format
"strat_<strategyname>". They take a reference to a database to search,
and a search string (whose format will probably depend on the
strategy). The return value should be a list of values which are
returned from the database when the data for matching words is
fetched.

* In both cases, I suggest you look at the example strategies and
database handlers to see how things are done. I'm probably not
explaining it very well.

-- Jay Kominek <[email protected]>
   Hail Eris!