[HN Gopher] Quran API
___________________________________________________________________
Quran API
Author : asim
Score : 158 points
Date : 2021-09-20 10:15 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (m3o.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (m3o.com)
| suriyaG wrote:
| This is cool, dunno why the hate though. There was I think a
| similar one for Bible as well.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23737601
| friendly_chap wrote:
| Yeah, I am somewhat appaled by that too, why could we not have
| APIs of religious texts (edit: unless it is against the
| particular religion in question, thus offending believers)?
|
| Disclaimer: I am one of the contributors of the site.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I'm not religious, but I've always assumed belief in one
| religion means you believe other religions are false maybe
| even fake. To say you are a practicing _____ (insert
| religion), you're in essence saying my religion is right and
| others are wrong maybe even infidels or heathens. I can see
| how people who believe in these things could take offence if
| they're of a different belief.
| Arnavion wrote:
| >To say you are a practicing _____ (insert religion),
| you're in essence saying my religion is right and others
| are wrong maybe even infidels or heathens.
|
| I don't really want to shit on any particular religion, so
| I'll just say that what you've written does not apply to
| most religious people. Most religions have a live-and-let-
| live attitude when it comes to other people's religious
| beliefs.
| buu700 wrote:
| The premise doesn't make much sense to me in the first
| place.
|
| I think all religions are probably wrong, as far as their
| metaphysical hypotheses go. By the same logic, that
| should actually be _more_ offensive than thinking that N
| - 1 are religions are wrong, not less. (I don 't
| personally see how either is offensive, to be clear.)
| sinyug wrote:
| > Most religions have a live-and-let-live attitude when
| it comes to other people's religious beliefs.
|
| This does not apply to monotheistic faiths. The first
| problem is that they claim that their god is the _only_
| god. The second problem is that they prescribe
| punishments (death, eternal hellfire etc) for those who
| do not accept their god. True believers then go out and
| implement these policies making liberal use of both the
| carrot and the sword. This has been observed everywhere
| from ancient Egypt under the rule of Amenhotep IV to
| modern religions like communism where persecution of
| other religions is almost a given.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atenism
| bobthechef wrote:
| > This does not apply to monotheistic faiths. The first
| problem is that they claim that their god is the only
| god. The second problem is that they prescribe
| punishments (death, eternal hellfire etc) for those who
| do not accept their god.
|
| You've completely misconstrued the nature of tolerance.
|
| First, the only valid reason to hold to any religious
| faith is that you are convinced that it is true. Period.
| This isn't a narrative among many that you can pretend to
| believe because it adds structure to your life or some
| other benefit. You believe it primarily because you think
| it's true. (The benefits are secondary, though you would
| expect them if you've got truth. Truth allows you to live
| in conformity with reality and your own nature and thus
| your own good.)
|
| Second, you have completely misconstrued what Abrahamic
| religions believe w.r.t. God. God is not comparable to
| pagan gods. Pagan gods are just more powerful beings.
| Each pagan god is just one being among many. That is not
| the case for the Abrahamic religions, certainly not
| Christianity and definitive not Catholic understanding.
| God is the Ipsum Esse Subsistens or subsisting Being
| Itself. Jesus is the Logos, not some guy competing for
| marketshare with other gods. This sort of monotheism
| isn't the reduction of the pantheon to one god. It is the
| definitive abolishment of the superstition of pagan
| religion. You actually don't need to appeal to any of
| these religious faiths to arrive at God thus understood.
| All you need is metaphysics.
|
| Third, the claim that a lack of faith in God is sure to
| lead you to hell has nothing to do with intolerance.
| That's like saying that anyone who claims that driving
| off a cliff will kill you or taking drugs will destroy
| your life is an intolerant person engaging in
| fearmongering to control people and keep them from having
| fun. If you were headed toward a cliff, or about to shoot
| up some heroin, wouldn't you want someone to tell you
| that you'd about to ruin your life or kill yourself? If
| someone believes that a lack of faith will lead to your
| eternal damnation, then it is rather a sign of charity
| and love that they should let you know you're in danger,
| even if they're wrong. You can appreciate the concern at
| the least. You seem to be suggesting the absurd idea that
| it is intolerant to be certain of your beliefs and thus
| certain that someone else is in error. That's
| preposterous. What's intolerant is this definition that
| requires people to artificially deny their certainties
| and "tone it down" because their beliefs make some people
| feel uncomfortable for some weird reason. Mind you,
| believing a lack of faith is a path to hell does not
| imply forcing people to accept that faith. The Catholic
| and Christian tradition recognizes the need to
| evangelize, but not the legitimacy of coercion. Coercion
| doesn't even make sense since free assent is necessary
| for faith to be authentic anyway. All you'd get are
| people pretending to believe to avoid unwelcome
| consequences, and that's pointless and would constitute
| fraud at best (for which they might not be culpable if
| the coercion were severe enough). And FWIW Catholic
| tradition as far as I know is more or less consistent in
| at least suspecting that most CATHOLICS probably end up
| in hell.
| Arnavion wrote:
| >This does not apply to monotheistic faiths. The first
| problem is that they claim that their god is the only
| god. The second problem is that they prescribe
| punishments (death, eternal hellfire etc) for those who
| do not accept their god.
|
| No, your "second problem" does not apply to _all_
| monotheistic faiths.
| schoen wrote:
| I think technically they are henotheistic or monolatrous
| if they don't deny the existence and divinity of other
| gods.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henotheism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolatry
|
| (although there are probably religious traditions that
| don't have an explicit view or doctrine about some of
| these questions, so they might be hard to classify in
| this framework)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Classifying communism as a monotheistic religion is... an
| interesting take.
|
| I'm not sure that I disagree. But I'm not sure that I
| agree, either. I'm going to have to think about it. (This
| is about the highest compliment that you can pay to an HN
| comment.)
| jl6 wrote:
| Most religious texts don't admit a consistent reading, so
| the degree to which live-and-let-live applies depends
| almost entirely on interpretation and culture, and very
| little on what the text actually says.
|
| For example, most real-world Christians and Muslims are
| highly tolerant of unbelievers in their everyday lives,
| but that is _not_ what their books say.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| r00fus wrote:
| It all sounds so childish to me as a current atheist. Like,
| who's sports team are you a fan? If not mine, then you're
| against me.
|
| In fact, an API that allows access to a religious text
| should be useful for everyone - even those detractors of
| said religion.
|
| Next up, we need a legal code API and versioning.
| cat199 wrote:
| many subgroups of atheism, and many of those fight and
| have fought each other..
|
| agree 100% on legal code versioning - legislation should
| be a version control diff with 'git blame' like things
| for contributors ..
| bobthechef wrote:
| It's childish to have issues with someone making their
| religious texts available via API just because they take
| that religion to be false, yes. But you're sort of
| erecting a strawman. I don't see anyone claiming "I hate
| this API because I disagree with Islam.".
|
| Also maybe this is it? Haven't checked. https://eur-
| lex.europa.eu/content/help/webservice.html
| cphoover wrote:
| a law API makes sense to me because laws are updated all
| the time, especially when you take into consideration all
| the various jurisdictions. A Quran or biblical text API
| makes less sense to me because it is essentially
| unchanging static text until the religious doctrine is
| amended.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Three things: 1. It may not be as unchanging as you
| think. The different translations of the Bible (NIV, ESV,
| NKJV, NASB, etc.) are a pretty important facet to many,
| with newer translations coming to prominence in English
| speaking communities every ten years or so (for better or
| for worse, but that's another topic). I can't speak to
| other religious texts, but keeping new translation
| available could be enough of a reason alone to make an
| API. 2. Having an API can facilitate internationalization
| if you wanted to ship a project in other languages. 3.
| Having an easy way for a computer to look up a particular
| passage is a non-trivial problem to solve, and something
| like this could give a huge jump start for hobby/personal
| projects.
|
| Yeah you could just download the Quran and reference it
| locally or someone could (relatively) easily roll their
| own version of this, but I think something like this is
| nice and I can appreciate it's value, even if Islam isn't
| my cup of tea.
|
| [edited for clarity]
| trutannus wrote:
| Well, to take the example here of Islam, that's not
| entirely correct. In Islam, those who are following Judaeo-
| Christian belief systems are considered 'brothers of the
| book' (or something to that effect). The worst that some
| sects believe is that they are 'well meaning, but not aware
| of the truth of Mohamed'. I'm specifically not talking
| about radical Jihadist sects, but the more 'middle of the
| road' Muslims who are closer to the average church going
| American than an Al-Qaeda member.
| icemelt8 wrote:
| "People of The Book" Jesus is the most named person in
| Quran, along with Mary.
| omarfarooq wrote:
| Ahlul-Kitab or People of the Book.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I think it has less to do with the content of the API and
| more to do with the fact that it's essentially a way to query
| a small number of megabytes of structured data. You could
| encode the whole thing as JSON or SQLite and eliminate the
| network round trip (latency, security footprint, privacy
| implications) entirely.
|
| In fact, the memory usage required to establish a few TLS
| sessions might even be greater than the size of the full
| dataset.
| mrd3v0 wrote:
| >unless it is against the particular religion in question,
| thus offending believers
|
| Based on how many religions and sects of these religions out
| there, it is entirely unfeasible to have that as a criteria
| for anything. Human knowledge/text no matter what it contains
| could have APIs just fine.
| midoreigh wrote:
| This is really useful. Please do an API for Hadiths too.
| asim wrote:
| Thank you. That's what I just started work on! It will be here
| soon :)
| kamranahmedse wrote:
| What about the authenticity of the data?
| yessirwhatever wrote:
| If you understand Arabic and are interested in the exploration of
| the history of Muhammad, Islam, and the Arabic language, I'd
| recommend checking out https://www.youtube.com/c/KhaledBalkin
| schoen wrote:
| I took the view in this thread that downloading a file with the
| whole text would have a lot of big advantages compared to an API.
| A lot of other commenters have expressed this idea too.
|
| But I want to highlight something from a comment of mine further
| down: while looking for examples of downloadable sacred texts, I
| found this page
|
| https://hackathon.bible/data/
|
| which has -- alongside downloads -- a _whole bunch_ of actively-
| maintained APIs for Christian Bible verse access, some of them
| run by pretty prominent organizations.
|
| So, all of our intuitions about the merits of downloading sacred
| texts to bundle with apps are, apparently, not entirely shared by
| other developers. :-)
| jjice wrote:
| Seem like query parameters are going out of style. Doesn't really
| matter if we use them or a small JSON payload instead, same end
| result, but it is pretty interesting. This API opts for a body
| like: {"chapter":1}
|
| instead of ?chapter=1 in the URL. Just something I've noticed in
| a lot of APIs recently.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| POSTing a body, when a GET param is more RESTy, is unfortunate.
| But I am curious if some amount of developer convenience is
| leading to REST-like APIs (I like the way you put it) going out
| of style.
|
| A curiosity to be sure, and by no means a critical problem.
|
| EDIT: added some commas to help with parsing since I have my
| phrasing all turned about.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Query-params are not "un-RESTy", and posting when requesting
| static data is worse primarily for caching and semantics.
|
| For this usecase a ?chapter=1 query string would have been
| better and not at all less "RESTy".
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| I think you're read my message in reverse. I've said that
| POSTing is unRESTful when a GET is preferred.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Ah, yeah, seems I misunderstood!
| trutannus wrote:
| Wait until you come across an API that uses POST requests as
| GET requests. Worked on one recently where all search
| operations were submitted by POSTing the data. And it wasn't
| even something like a "send a search request to a queue".
| 1_player wrote:
| It's not even a case of being RESTy or not.
|
| A GET request with a `?chapter=1` argument is more correct
| than POST because then it's cacheable by browsers, proxies or
| middleware clients, and thus respects the spirit of the HTTP
| protocol.
|
| Only if the Qur'an is immutable, that is.
| whitefirered wrote:
| I am waiting for someone to make a spoof of Ask Jeeves called Ask
| Allah.
| cphoover wrote:
| what is the point of an API for static data like this? storage is
| cheap... why not just download the entire Quran, Bible, Torah,
| whatever to your local hard drive... why incur network latency
| for this task?
| josephwegner wrote:
| I am not familiar with the Quran, but for the Bible, different
| translations have different copyright policies. For instance,
| the ESV text is free for non-commercial use, but if you want to
| use it for commercial purposes you must pay a licensing fee.
|
| ESV has a pretty decent API, actually! https://api.esv.org/ I
| used it way back when when Google TV was a thing, to make a
| verse-display used during bible studies.
| rocketpastsix wrote:
| maybe they hope someone will do a verse (is it a verse in
| Islam? I'm not sure) type app that will text that data to
| subscribers or something.
| yebyen wrote:
| I think you mean Surah/Ayah (those are the expressions for
| what in the Quran is akin to Chapter/Verse)
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Linguistic curiosity: why would these expressions not be
| translated into English?
| icemelt8 wrote:
| its perfectly ok to call it a verse. Dr Zakir Naik, calls
| it Chapter/Verse in any of his speeches.
| jdmichal wrote:
| Domain-specific languages / jargon are not just a
| computer science thing.
| whitefirered wrote:
| It might be easier to use an api instead of having to go
| through it yourself.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| The alternative to the API is not plain text, it's structured
| data like SQLite.
| diskzero wrote:
| Some people find joy and satisfaction in developing systems. I
| don't have total insight on their plans, so I am not going to
| ask "What is the point?" I prefer never to ask "What is the
| point" to anyone unless somehow their efforts are providing a
| net negative to the human condition.
|
| Sometimes the "point" is because it can be done. Sometimes the
| point is someone wants to learn about building an API and would
| prefer to do it with the Quran rather than with movie quotes.
| drooby wrote:
| ....? Or maybe there is a interesting and expected answer
| that provides a learning experience? It doesn't hurt to ask.
| midev wrote:
| > Or maybe there is a interesting and expected answer that
| provides a learning experience?
|
| Then it should be phrased like that. It's obvious the
| original comment was phrased as a condescending question,
| especially since they tried to answer it themselves.
|
| There's a difference between genuine interest and trying to
| show off how smart you are.
| cphoover wrote:
| So quick to offense. it wasn't meant to be condescending,
| it was meant to be a serious technical critique of what
| appears to be a publicly advertised product.
| midev wrote:
| > it wasn't meant to be condescending, it was meant to be
| a serious technical critique of what appears to be a
| publicly advertised product
|
| Oh, I think everyone was confused because there was no
| serious technical critique. You made a flippant comment
| about disk space and network latency. Basic observations
| that anyone building this would have considered.
|
| You can see from all the comments that everyone viewed
| you as condescending and unhelpful. You might want to
| revisit your writing style, since your intentions are not
| clear to anyone.
| cphoover wrote:
| Judging by the other comments in this thread and the
| upvotes to my original comment, many people seem to agree
| with me also.
|
| you are an unpleasant person to talk with
| diskzero wrote:
| It never hurts to ask. It also never hurts to learn the
| appropriate way to phrase questions that are genuine. For
| some reason, a pattern develops in some people where they
| think there is value is just asking why all the time. It is
| best to stop and think before firing of your "Why didn't
| you just use solution X". This rarely leads to constructive
| dialog and instead generates a low-value conversation a lot
| like job interview situations where poor interviewers are
| trying to set up a candidate with why questions just so
| they can unload some ego boosting bit of advice.
| cphoover wrote:
| woah woah calm down... I wasn't trying to insult anyone.
|
| "I wanted to build a fun, cool project." Is a perfectly valid
| answer.
|
| I think there is value in people critiquing methods and
| designs for various systems. If I were building some new
| project I would want my peers to give me honest critique and
| constructive probing. I make mistakes all the time and would
| never learn from those mistakes if others didn't point them
| out to me.
|
| > "liabd 1 hour ago [-] This is awesome and will enable a
| whole suite of apps to be build on top of it. Great work"
|
| So even in this thread people are discussing adding this
| service as a dependency to their own applications. I think if
| you are building a project for yourself for fun that is one
| thing... but If you advertise it for public use, criticism is
| perfectly valid, and should be expected.
| bserge wrote:
| Scratching my head over this, too... I have over 50 ebooks on
| my phone, it barely even registers compared to the videos and
| apps. All perfectly searchable, too.
| [deleted]
| shaunxcode wrote:
| This is brilliant.
| asim wrote:
| It's a shame this was flagged. It's unclear why.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| Likely because Muslims are very prickly.
| vmception wrote:
| For context, there are a lot of people that also only want
| the Quran to be consumed in a certain way, such as original
| language variant, possibly even publisher, binding format.
|
| So English via API doesn't satisfy that.
| asim wrote:
| Could you elaborate?
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for religious flamewar. Not cool,
| and not what this site is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595832
|
| If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email
| hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll
| follow the rules in the future. They're here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| thendrill wrote:
| What a great initiative! All important human know lage should
| have free publicly available apis!
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Is it free?
| asim wrote:
| It is free yes
| itisit wrote:
| Verse'); DROP TABLE Quran; CREATE TABLE Progress;--
| throwawayswede wrote:
| Might as well `drop db religion` :)
| bob229 wrote:
| Love it!
| bserge wrote:
| I thought it was funny
| dang wrote:
| Please do not perpetuate religious flamewar on HN. It's not
| what this site is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Religious flamewar will get you banned here. No more of this,
| please.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: you've unfortunately been posting a lot of unsubstantive
| comments to HN. Could you please not do that? We're trying for
| something a bit different here.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/extrema.php
|
| Go to the one with most descendants, then keep visiting the
| descendant with most descendants.
|
| See how the flags start changing. From Islamic scholars to
| Italian to other European countries to American.
|
| Did we learn anything today? What does this mean?
|
| It means the only reason you have a computer today is because
| the Islamic civilization passed the torch of knowledge to the
| West. Then they got invaded by Mongols and we kept the flame
| alive.
| whitefirered wrote:
| So Afghanistan is the most technologically advanced country.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I am talking about 1000 AD not 2000 AD.
|
| Also, have you ever heard of UAE?
| throwawayswede wrote:
| > It means the only reason you have a computer today is
| because the Islamic civilization passed the torch of
| knowledge to the West.
|
| Overstatement of the day.
| nanis wrote:
| Maybe, but not too far off.
|
| Without the Ottoman Empire standing between Europe and
| trade with Asia, there wasn't going to be much of a
| motivation for exploring new trade roots.
|
| In fact, had the Ottomans just built proper toll roads,
| they may have held back the Reformation _and_ Renaissance
| for a 100 or so years. So, even if the preservation of
| mathematical and scientific knowledge during the dark ages
| were not a factor, the world would have ended up a rather
| different place.
|
| I know in European and American histories the existence of
| the Ottoman Empire and it's impact is not considered when
| evaluating the external forces that were nudging societies
| one way or another, but that does not mean there was just a
| void in the Eastern Mediterranean.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Ottomans came much later. I am talking about the Islamic
| golden age.
|
| The Islamic world introduced paper to Europe and the book
| translations that served as the basis for the
| Reinassance.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_1
| 2th...
| bobthechef wrote:
| > In fact, had the Ottomans just built proper toll roads,
| they may have held back the Reformation _and_ Renaissance
| for a 100 or so years.
|
| Now sure I follow. The Reformation in my view was not an
| inevitable advancement but an unnecessary disastrous
| event (involving a good deal of looting by
| protestantizing princes lusting after Church property)
| that plunged Europe into disastrous religious wars. Why
| would toll roads have slowed the arrival of this revolt
| against the Church?
|
| The Renaissance, pace the tidy myths we're taught in
| schools, was not some clean break from the Middle Ages or
| even a revolt, but a transition that was heavily indebted
| to the Middle Ages (actually, in terms of philosophy, it
| was kind of a mediocre period of history, save for
| perhaps some exceptions). Are you claiming that
| exploration was essential to the Renaissance? I'm not
| sure I buy that.
|
| > I know in European and American histories the existence
| of the Ottoman Empire and it's impact is not considered
| when evaluating the external forces that were nudging
| societies one way or another,
|
| I wouldn't generalize. Had the Ottomans conquered Vienna,
| it is argued that this breach through the Alps would have
| allowed the Ottomans to conquer the rest of Europe. Or at
| least tried to. That much is taught in some European
| countries.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| I'm sorry why wouldn't I just download the whole text? It's a
| document?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I'm not a muslim, but I do build a lot of tools for myself (and
| to a lesser degree for the public), and open APIs like these
| are incredibly convenient. Saves me from having to do a lot of
| data processing.
| jhgb wrote:
| I believe the gist of the question was "why provide remote
| access to data that is just several megabytes in size?". You
| could easily pack both the code AND all the data into a
| single package. Equally convenient AND works offline at the
| same time.
| cphoover wrote:
| good explanation summarizing my critique as well
| jhgb wrote:
| Didn't you hear? APIs are the new religion. ;)
| pletnes wrote:
| Is it freely available in a structured, machine readable <<here
| is verse XX>> format?
|
| I could ask the same for other holy texts, I guess.
| jhgb wrote:
| I bet pretty much all of them will be. People have all sorts
| of weird hobbies, so for every holy text three thousand years
| old, there will be at least six machine-readable versions.
| asim wrote:
| People may want to not only read but build apps, websites,
| include the text, translate, etc. So it's more about
| programmatic access to the text. If you see Quran.com this is
| exactly what it does.
| cphoover wrote:
| why can't you have programmatic access to local data though?
| Store the data in a sqlite database if you care to. there are
| all sorts of different clients that interact with local or
| embedded data
| fredros wrote:
| Checking chapter 9, verse 30 to check if god still wants
| Christians and Jews to be annihilated.
| dang wrote:
| Religious flamewar will get you banned here. No more of this,
| please.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| fredros wrote:
| I often see anti-Christian rants here. I suggest you become
| more supportive of free speech.
|
| By the way I'm just paraphrasing a problematic verse. Go and
| check yourself. Is it ok to link to hateful content?
|
| Your rules though, noted.
| dang wrote:
| We crack down on religious flamewar regardless of which
| religion is being flamed or doing the flaming. This is one
| of the easier aspects of moderation, actually, because such
| flamewars are easy to identify and relatively easy to
| avoid.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&qu
| e...
|
| It's common for people to believe that the community and/or
| the mods are biased against their side, but I can tell you
| for sure that anti-Christian rants aren't any more ok on HN
| than anti-any-other-religion rants. If you think you're
| seeing otherwise, the explanation is almost certainly a
| combination of:
|
| (1) People tend to notice what they dislike and put a
| stronger emphasis on it - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange
| =all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... This leads to false
| feelings of generality - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=
| all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Usually the feeling is "the
| community (or mods) are biased against my side". Literally
| all sides end up feeling this. I guarantee you that people
| on the other side feel just as aggrieved about it.
|
| (2) We don't see everything that gets posted and it takes
| time to moderate what we do see - https://hn.algolia.com/?d
| ateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
|
| Now I need to ask you again to stop posting religious
| flamewar comments because you just did it again. If you
| keep that up, we are going to have to ban you.
| fredros wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to explain the rationale. I
| guess there are always subjective motives when
| moderating.
| dang wrote:
| I'd be curious to hear what you find subjective in the
| above, or what you think the motives are!
| roschdal wrote:
| What is the API call for the Four wives request?
| pwnapple wrote:
| This seems very similar to the work over at Quran.com and their
| API: https://quran.api-docs.io/v4/getting-started/introduction
|
| If you did use their resources, please cite/reference them :)
| asim wrote:
| Yes, we are building on that API. It's referenced here
| https://github.com/micro/services/tree/master/quran.
| Unfortunately we're having some issues with our readme
| processing and haven't yet fixed. All credit will be given
| where it is due.
| croumet wrote:
| Verse 9:30
|
| The Jews say, "Ezra is the son of Allah "; and the Christians
| say, "The Messiah is the son of Allah." That is their statement
| from their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who
| disbelieved [before them]. May Allah destroy them; how are they
| deluded?
|
| Come on dang, ban me for HATE FACTS.
| fjfaase wrote:
| Or just downloaded it as a PDF, from for example wikimedia:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/The_Holy...
| midev wrote:
| Or even buy a copy of the book! We can do anything if we throw
| out all our requirements!
|
| Can you explain how I'd make calls from a frontend to a PDF?
| I'd like to include various search terms, and then get back
| well-structured data.
|
| Is this something PDF's recently started supporting?
| roschdal wrote:
| Jihad as a service.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| You might be interested in:
|
| WILL A CAT WALK ON THE QURAN? 2ND EXPERIMENT (100% ARABIC
| QURANS!)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBwvPJa0HPE
| dang wrote:
| Religious flamewar will get you banned here. No more of this,
| please.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| oa335 wrote:
| Revelation place and revelation order should be tagged with the
| source (I.e. where that information is conning from), as it's not
| 100% known in either Muslim canonical or western academic
| histories, whereas this dataset makes it seems like it is a known
| agreed upon fact.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| cool
| aliabd wrote:
| This is awesome and will enable a whole suite of apps to be build
| on top of it. Great work
| hsn915 wrote:
| You can download an xml or sql file from here
|
| https://tanzil.net/download/
|
| They also provide metadata for download
|
| https://tanzil.net/docs/Quran_Metadata
|
| If you instead send an http request to antoher server, you are
| just introducing a pointless dependency in your system. It will
| make your system generally slower because it will take more time
| to get answers. There's absolutely no benefit.
| foobarian wrote:
| If you use the API, the service maintainer can transparently to
| you switch to a better storage format, or query engine, or
| invent a whole new CMS.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Your phone can scan the whole dump in-memory, byte by byte
| faster than your eyes can blink. If the query engine is the
| problem, you've chosen a very bad query engine.
| friendly_chap wrote:
| I can think of a few:
|
| - type safe clients provided by M3o
|
| - reducing app/webapp/binary space by relying on APIs to get a
| subset of the content you need
|
| - a web interface to query the data
|
| There are probably a few more, YMMV
| hsn915 wrote:
| How is it type safe? Type safety is worse for http calls
| because you literlly have no idea at compile time what the
| data will be. Where as, when all the data is in your
| repository, you can verify the data matches what you expect.
|
| Reudcing space? Really? The data is actually very small. Your
| npm modules take a lot more space. If anything is really
| cheap and not worth worrying about, it's disk space.
| friendly_chap wrote:
| Have a look at the Go clients for example. There are proper
| type safe clients for each API generated form our protobuf
| definitions.
|
| > Type safety is worse for http calls because you literlly
| have no idea at compile time what the data will be.
|
| We promise we will return data as per API spec ;)
|
| > The data is actually very small
|
| For this particular example, I guess you are right.
|
| Our vision is that all APIs will have uniform clients, docs
| etc, so in aggregate it will provide a very convenient
| workflow. So instead of downloading a.json and b.xml and
| c.yaml (if possible at all due to size) and defining data
| structures yourself, just import our library and you are
| good to go.
|
| But as I said, YMMV. If it's not your cup of tea, I
| understand that too.
| schoen wrote:
| > We promise we will return data as per API spec ;)
|
| Unfortunately, I don't think that an assumption about the
| data that's returned from a web API based on a
| developer's statement on an online forum is really what's
| meant by "type safety". :-)
| schoen wrote:
| Above I suggested that reducing space could sometimes be
| relevant -- I think interactive maps are a very familiar
| example, although offline maps are _great_ for privacy and
| for being able to use them in the wilderness.
|
| Even though I don't think that the Quran API will benefit
| many applications, you could probably envision some, like
| very tiny embedded systems that don't have even megabytes
| of spare local storage (but do have some kind of user
| interface).
| anosidium wrote:
| So the entire Qur'an in XML or SQL file? Is that how some
| Qur'an apps are able to provide offline reading?
| donkeybeer wrote:
| I hope my question isn't seen as rude, but have you worked on
| a non-web app before? Its been the natural thing to bundle
| all data needed offline and locally along with the app
| throughout history. I emphasize I don't mean to sound rude,
| your question just felt surprising to me. (It seems you are
| been downvoted and I gave you an up personally.)
| schoen wrote:
| Probably so!
|
| Here's a list of electronic text resources for the Christian
| Bible
|
| https://hackathon.bible/data/
|
| of which (surprisingly to me) many are also APIs rather than
| downloads. But there are lots of downloads like XML and text
| files. One that I found of the King James Version translation
| has lines like
|
| Gen|4|26| And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and
| he called his name Enos: then began men to call upon the name
| of the LORD.~
|
| i.e. book of Genesis, chapter 4, verse 26, followed by an
| ASCII string of that verse.
|
| The Quran download mentioned in the grandparent comment at
|
| https://tanzil.net/download/
|
| includes text files with lines like
|
| 2|150|ai au aaa aaWi aaa aa aii aai aau a uu aaWu uuau aau
| iaWa aua iWai aau uWaun iWa Waia aau iu aa aau aai aiuiWa iai
| aau aaaWau aaua
|
| i.e. surah 2, ayah 150, followed by a Unicode string of the
| text of that ayah. (There's no "book" field because of the
| sufficiency of the surah numbers.) This file is about 1.3
| megabytes uncompressed, although of course it doesn't include
| additional data that a user might want to have presented (the
| transliterations or translations mentioned elsewhere in this
| thread, for example).
|
| There are probably lots of mobile apps that have graphics
| files alone that are larger than this 1.3 megabyte Quran text
| file. (Not that mobile apps are the only application for the
| APIs or anything.)
|
| Another online text at
|
| https://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/htq/index.htm
|
| gives each surah in a separate file (less convenient for
| downloading, although you could still do it in a few
| minutes!), so that ayah is
|
| 150 wamin Haythu kharajta fawalWi wajhaka shaTra 'lmasjidi
| 'lHarami waHaythu ma kuntum fawalWuw wujuwhakum shaTrahu
| liy'alWa yakuwna lilnWasi `alaykum HujWa@un ilWa 'lWadhiyna
| Zalamuw minhum fala takhshawhum wa'khshawni~ wali'utimWa
| ni`mati~ `alaykum wala`alWakum tahtaduwna
|
| There's some kind of Unicode issue where the letters in the
| second version seem to be connecting better (e.g. ma rather
| than a), but my knowledge of Arabic isn't enough to make it
| obvious to me whether the second one is a more correct
| encoding or the first one is just making more assumptions
| about the rendering or something.
| Zababa wrote:
| > If you instead send an http request to antoher server, you
| are just introducing a pointless dependency in your system. It
| will make your system generally slower because it will take
| more time to get answers. There's absolutely no benefit.
|
| To expand on that, here downloading the file is a way of
| caching the data. Caching invalidation can be tricky, but for
| something like this it's actually easy, so you can afford all
| the benefits of a cache.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| What about the Quran is changing often enough for cache
| invalidation to be a problem?
| asim wrote:
| Sometimes its a preference of use. If the API is simple and
| easy to use, if it provides translations and transliterations
| you prefer, if it means not needing to process xml or sql which
| I believe a lot of us would prefer not to do.
| schoen wrote:
| Sure, at the cost of having something that usually has a
| higher latency for lookups, that only works online, that
| could have outages due to data center or network problems,
| that could get hacked and made to return corrupted data, and
| that may or may not be available forever.
|
| Those seem like pretty high costs to me mainly to avoid
| processing a local database. Especially if someone could wrap
| the local database with a library that has the same interface
| as the network API! (That library could stop being
| maintained, but the failure modes are much narrower than the
| failure modes of a network service.)
|
| A lot of the comments in this thread are suggesting that an
| API to search small public data is not a very productive
| approach compared to having that data present locally in
| programs that will use it. I can think of lots of advantages
| that network APIs could have:
|
| * querying nonpublic data (including nonpublic data that the
| end user is fully entitled to access all of, but doesn't want
| to cache on a mobile device because of its sensitivity)
|
| * applying a sophisticated algorithm to the data
|
| * offloading computation or storage to a more powerful device
|
| * dealing with frequent updates or edits to the data
|
| * ...
|
| However, none of those seem to apply readily to the case of
| searching a specific religious or literary text, because
| downloading the complete text is usually a very practical
| option. (I guess the "nonpublic data" part could also apply
| because some of the translations and transliterations and
| associated information might be under copyright, and the
| copyright holder might choose to authorize the API but not
| authorize bulk downloads of the database. That could also be
| true for modern commentaries and annotations.)
|
| The only other one that comes to mind for me in terms of
| people's enthusiasm for this API approach (and indeed in the
| comment I'm replying to) is
|
| * developers are very used to querying web APIs (and don't
| like writing their own parsers)
|
| That's fair, but I feel like it's best mitigated by having
| someone develop a reliable library for parsing a particular
| database or dataset, with a nice API that the developers will
| be happy with.
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