XOWA is an offline Wikipedia application. It can run an offline copy of Wikipedia on your computer by using any of the dumps at <ahref="https://dumps.wikimedia.org"rel="nofollow"class="external free">https://dumps.wikimedia.org</a> It can run as a standalone GUI application, as a Firefox addon, or as a HTTP server.
XOWA runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. These instructions will assume the user is on a 64-bit Linux system. However, if you're on a different system, the same instructions still apply. Simply substitute "linux_64" with the appropriate XOWA operating system name from below:
<spanclass="mw-headline"id="Setup_the_XOWA_app">Setup the XOWA app</span>
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Download the latest XOWA app package for your operating system. For example, if you're on a 64-bit Linux system, "xowa_app_linux_64_v1.9.5.1.zip".
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Unzip the XOWA app package to a directory. For the sake of simplicity, these instructions assume this directory is "/xowa/"
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Review your directories. You should have the following:
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An XOWA jar: "/xowa/xowa_linux_64.jar"
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An XOWA "/bin/any/" directory with several jar files. For example, "/xowa/bin/any/java/apache/commons-compress-1.5.jar"
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An XOWA "/bin/linux_64/" directory with an SWT jar: "/xowa/bin/linux_64/swt/swt.jar"
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<spanclass="mw-headline"id="Setup_the_XOWA_source">Setup the XOWA source</span>
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Download the latest XOWA source archive. For example: "xowa_source_v1.9.5.1.7z"
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Unzip the source to "/xowa/dev". When you're done, you'll have a file called "/xowa/dev/build.xml" as well as others
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NOTE: if you're not on a Linux 64-bit system, overwrite the swt jar at "/xowa/dev/150_gfui/lib/swt.jar" with the copy from your "/bin/OS" directory. For example, if you're on a 64 bit Windows system, replace "/xowa/dev/150_gfui/lib/swt.jar" with "/bin/windows_64/swt/swt/jar"
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<spanclass="mw-headline"id="Run_the_ant_file">Run the ant file</span>
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Open up a console, and run "ant -buildfile build.xml -Dplat_name=linux_64"
For many Java programmers my style will appear idiosyncratic if not downright strange.
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Some background may help explain the current condition:
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Most of the lower libraries originated in C#. They were ported to Java about two to three years ago. As such, many of the idioms are not in Java. This includes exceptions (no checked exceptions), events (no anonymous inner classes) and properties (no getProperty/setProperty pattern).
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As a corollary to the above, much of the code takes a language-agnostic approach. For example, during the migration, the gui library needed a way to invoke similar methods in .NET Winforms and Java Swing without directly binding to either. Event handling, IO calls, reflection and many other functions fall into this same category as there are a number of differences between the .NET and Java libraries.
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Even with the above, the style is admittedly eccentric. For this, I will try to standardize it wherever it is inconsistent or whenever it becomes a point of contention.
<li><ahref="http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html"title="Get wiki datababase dumps directly from Wikimedia">Wikimedia dumps</a></li>
<li><ahref="https://archive.org/search.php?query=xowa"title="Search archive.org for XOWA files">XOWA @ archive.org</a></li>
<li><ahref="http://en.wikipedia.org"title="Visit Wikipedia (and compare to XOWA!)">English Wikipedia</a></li>
</ul>
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