Thwab	An Electronic Encyclopedia system.

	"in which there are valuable Books." V98:3

	by Muayyad Saleh Alsadi<alsadi@gmail.com>
	Released under terms of GNU GPL
	Copyright © 2007, Arabeyes.org

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301 USA

What does Thwab mean ?

Thwab is an Arabic word which mean "eternal reward"
which represent my attitude toward programming,
the reward I expect for my software is not temporal.
I won't deprive people from information for temporal rewards.
It's a very important ethical attitude we have learned from
Prophet Muhammad who thought us that "Who conceal (obstruct,block or deny) any type of knowledge (or science) will be bridle with a bridle of fire on the Day of Resurrection."

{(...) وَتَعَاوَنُواْ عَلَى البِرِّ والتَّقَوى، وَلا تَعَاوَنُواْ عَلَى الإِثمِ وَالعُدوَانِ، وَاتَّقُواْ اللَّهَ، إِنَّ اللَّهَ شَدِِيدُ الْعِقَابِ} 
meaning translation: {(...) help you one another in Al-Birr and Al-Taqwa (virtue, righteousness and piety); but do not help one another in sin and transgression. And fear Allah . Verily, Allah is Severe in punishment.} (Quran, V5:2)

{ إِنَّ الَّذِينَ يَكْتُمُونَ مَآ أَنزَلْنَا مِنَ الْبَيِّنَاتِ وَالْهُدَى مِن بَعْدِ مَا بَيَّنَّاهُ لِلنَّاسِ فِي الْكِتَابِ أُوْلئِكَ يَلْعَنُهُمُ اللَّهُ وَيَلْعَنُهُمُ الَّلاعِنُونَ }
meaning translation: { Verily, those who conceal the clear proofs, evidences and the guidance, which We have sent down, after We have made it clear for the people in the Book, they are the ones cursed by Allah and cursed by cursers.} (Quran, V2:159)

Thwab is an Electronic Encyclopedia System
that is international, portable, simple, 
extensible (as one could add more books and articles),
fast, caching, smart and maybe at some level intelligent!

Unlike Windows-Based proprietary Encyclopedia Systems
this library does not use personal (aka. silly ) database back-ends (eg. MS-Access) for millions of reasons, and unlike many free (open-source) systems
it does not use XML as it's almost impossible
to be randomly accessed without holding the entire file on RAM which on our case could be very large.

Thwab use very efficient compression in terms of
both speed and size, it use a standard hierarchy
of plain text files archived with standard TAR file format and compressed with BZip2 library (a very strong compression) that is some how optimized for fast random access through few-bytes index file and few compression-degrading calls to BZip2 library (called iTar).

WHERE DID THE IDEA COME FROM ?
There are many free Islamic libraries and software but they are for Windows, they use MS Access files as back-ends, I wanted to create my own Islamic labrary for GNU/Linux, I thought of a well compressed file format but yet fast. I also added a fuzzy-logic search engine.

HOW DOES IT REALLY WORK? How to create Thwab files ?
You need the follwoing tools:

You need the following tools
 * File Manager
 * Text Editor
 * iTar archiver
 * Thwab scripts (optional)
see the reference in the program.

BUGS:
Thwab is still under heavy development
not all planed features are implemented yet,
and not all specification are yet planed,
but it's usable.
