It is a light weight client that communicates with a 'sword server' to perform queries and extract text. A sword server can be any UNIX or Linux based machine on the Internet that runs a copy of my 'swordd' software. This technique allows a central server to handle all the storage and CPU issues that go along with having and searching a large number of large texts, without each client installation requiring its own copies.

It requires no special libraries or interfaces, and runs fine in a safe-mode environment. All interaction with sword modules is done via a standard TCP/IP connection to the swordd server.