Meeting schedule as reusable api microservice.

[ernichechelski]

Hi!

I really admire the work that’s being done here — it’s impressive!

My experience is primarily with native iOS development, so I’ve found it a bit challenging to fully understand the structure of this project. That said, I wanted to bring up one topic.

Integrating this app into the full congregation workflow can be difficult for several reasons — mainly because every member would need to be familiar with such tools. Personally, I’ve found it most practical to apply programming skills to improve smaller, more specific areas. For example, I’ve automated the creation of literature cart schedules, which has been quite helpful.

I’d love to expand on that and automate the creation of schedules for upcoming meetings. However, that’s proven to be a tricky challenge. I considered parsing the .jwpub files for schedule data, but that approach seems quite fragile and hard to maintain.

That’s why I was excited to see (unless I misunderstood!) that you’ve published a separate API that provides this kind of data. 😄

Would you consider making that API public or open source? I’d be thrilled to help create clear documentation so that the functionality could be implemented across different languages and platforms.

An independent API that serves meeting schedule data could really enable the development of lightweight tools — not as competitors to your app, of course, but as complementary utilities focused on specific tasks (e.g., generating blank Google Docs schedules that others can easily fill in).

What do you think? Maybe would you be so kind to give me some hint where to start to implement it by myself? 🤔

Regards! ☺️

[rhahao]

Hi @ernichechelski, thank you for reaching out.

The meeting sources API uses this npm package: jw-epub-parser, so feel free to check it out if you want to help us on improving it. We created the API that uses this package to reduce the workload of the app, and expose the endpoint to the app.

Thank you.

[rhahao]

Forgot to add: the endpoint is also public using this uri: https://api-source-materials.sws2apps.com/api/:code
The code params is the same language code used on jw.org.

Support for additional languages will be added as soon as the npm package can parse their EPUB files. Thanks.

[ernichechelski]

Poland does not have EPUBs right now, only JWPub. So I guess this solution won't work, right? I wonder how do you support those languages 🤔

[rhahao]

Correct. For these languages, I have to do manual works to put their meeting data in the API Cache.

[njasper1]

Correct. For these languages, I have to do manual works to put their meeting data in the API Cache.

This is very labour intensive to do this manually for all languages. Is web scraping on wol.jw.org an option for these languages ​​where no epub is available?

[rhahao]

@ernichechelski, @njasper1: the new package meeting-schedules-parser can now parse jwpub files. Thank you.