Rundata-net

Rundata-net is a web version of Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base [1] (SRDB). It is written in Python/Django and uses JavaScript (jQuery) extensively.

The original Rundata app is a desktop application with native support on Windows platform only. I first wrote a cross-platform version, Rundata-qt [2], in C++/Qt, but then decided to give a web version a try. Although, to begin with, this was done merely as a proof of concept, Rundata-net now supersedes Rundata-qt.

Rundata-net attempts to be a close clone of Rundata. This means that I haven’t tried to fix anything in the database itself. Rundata has a long history. Its functionality may seem limited at the beginning; however, it is still greater than that of Rundata-net. Rundata-net doesn’t support all the kinds of searches that Rundata does. Yet.

There is a website running the latest version of Rundata-net. You can find it at https://www.rundata.info. Just to be clear, Rundata-net is the name of the project; www.rundata.info is a website that runs Rundata-net. The source code of Rundata-net is provided under the terms of a GNU GPLv3 license. This means that you may grab a copy of Rundata-net and run it on your website or local machine.

Just a couple of words about how Rundata-net works. It is a single page application (SPA) that runs in your browser. It has a server side and a client side. The server side is powered by Django, but it is not used for all that many things now. The client side is where all the magic happens. I took a quite radical approach as regards the database (some might even call it wrong). Since the database is known not to change very often I decided to expose it to the client side completely so that, once loaded, there are no server requests to search the database. I intend to continue with this approach when I introduce user settings. Modern browsers can do a lot of things inside them, so why not use this? Obviously, this has potential limitations due to the user’s hardware. However, modern smartphones are so powerful that handling a comparatively small database like SRDB in the browser is no problem at all. Because of this client size processing, however, the loading of the website may take some time.

The client side utilizes a lot of excellent Javascript libraries. Here is the list of external libraries and frameworks used on the client side in no particular order:

License

Copyright (c) 2018, Vadim Frolov

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 3 of the License or (at your option) any later version.

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, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Acknowledgements

This project wouldn’t have been possible without the help of:

  • Sofia Pereswetoff-Morath [3]. Sofia provided scholarly input and encouragement.

  • Jan Owe [4]. Jan is the maintainer of the original Rundata program and the database.

  • Marcus Smith [5]. Marcus developed what was probably the first web version of Rundata. I used his website for inspiration and CSS styles.

Browser compatibility

The following is a list of the browsers in which Rundata-net is known to work. A version starting from which Rundata-net is known to work fine is specified for each browser.

Browser

Version

Notes

Microsoft Edge

12

Chrome

49

Firefox

44

Internet Explorer

-

Not supported

Safari

-

Not supported

References