Shuhai Wenyuan Content: Grammar

Technical Specifications

As a project developed by humanists rather than computer scientists, and as a project intended to be replicated by other humanists, Shuhai Wenyuan was conceived from the start to be easy and inexpensive to develop, deploy, and maintain. As a result, we use only only the most efficient and cost-effective technology.

Our database software is a powerful off-the-shelf product called 4th Dimension (4D). Employing this rather than developing our own software from scratch has the following benefits:

• Cost-effectiveness--Not only is 4D free for academic use, owing to its ease of use one can either build a database oneself or hire a contract developer rather than employing a full-time programer. In addition, 4D's existing database architecture, tools, and scripting functions significantly reduce the developer's load, and because it is nearly maintenance free, it does not require professional monitoring.
• Flexibility--4D offers a full-featured Pascal-like language that allows flexible and efficient programming, and by offering structure and programming functions that are modifiable during and after development, 4D allows changes to be made at any step in the project's evolution. In addition, 4D is cross-platform (internet-, Java-, SQL-, Oracle-, Mac-, PC-compatible), and because it is a commercial product, it offers consistent and unproblematic updates as enhancements are made and as platforms and standards change. In fact, 4D excels at innovating and keeping up with industry changes, such as, in our case, handling Asian Languages.
• Capacity--4D's gross data capacity is theoretically unlimited; other limits, like number of fields allowable, are typically larger by a magnitude of ten than our (fairly large) project requires.
• Data Integrity--4D allows for data to be stored as binary large objects, preserving all formats unaltered. This minimizes the possibility of data corruption and allows for streamlined portability.

Our server and desktop computers are comprised of three (now) older generation Apple Macintosh Power Mac G4s running Mac OS 9.2 (soon to be upgraded to system 10.2). Our scanner is the superfast Fujitsu ScanPartner 15C connected to an old IBM Pentium running Chinese Windows XP.

We chose Apple as our main platform for the following reasons:

• Apple Macintosh, from both the user and developer standpoints, is still the easiest to use and most reliable system software available.
• By developing on the Mac, we ensure that our system is usable on the Macintosh platform, a platform that though widely used in the humanities, is sometimes overlooked by PC-centric developers.
• By using Macintosh, we ensure that we can use all data available, for the reason that the Macintosh can nearly always use data from PCs, while the opposite is less often the case.