At work I’ve been asked to write a (very small) SWT app, being the only member of the development team with any Java GUI experience at all (I’ve written some Swing apps before).

Of course, there are hundreds of SWT resources out there on the web, notably on dev.eclipse.org web site and the eclipse wiki, but by far the best I found were notes written for Computer Science students (in pdf) – if only my lecturers had been able to make things this clear, simple and understandable!

It’s interesting to note that Eugene Belyaev has also started to look at SWT, and in whose comments, someone has also posted a link to the resources I mention above.

Serendipity is clearly afoot though, because his previous weblog entry is about how to
Launch the default browser on Windows
with this bit of code:


String url = "http://www.eugenebelyaev.com";
Runtime.getRuntime().exec("rundll32 url.dll,FileProtocolHandler " + url);

which I was also looking for!

I hate crashes in the middle of blog posts. But anyway..

JabRSS has been playing up all today, so I only got the news via the old-school method of visiting Danny’s site, but Peter Saint-Andre (aka King of Jabber) has posted on the rdfweb-dev mailing list that they’re thinking about using FOAF to identify Jabber entities. Currently Jabber uses vCard to identify users, and a hacked vCard-temp namespace to identify Jabber Components (IIRC); the use of FOAF would be a great, great move. These are currently the two technologies I’m most interested in, so perhaps I’m biased, but I can’t see of anything but good coming from this.

On a more downbeat note, I can’t quite get my head around what the simplest way of linking a Jabber account with a pre-exisiting FOAF file could be, except for some kind of smushing based on the jabberID property.

Interestingly, Peter points out that It [FOAF] defines data elements for things like projectHomepage and geek code, but not for things like marital status or sex. This hadn’t even occured to me before. The file says who I am, who I know, where I went to school and what my interests are, but not if I’m a boy or a girl. Is this an oversight, or defined elsewhere? I’ve not seen it in the relationship vocab or biographical vocab, which seemed the only likely candidates.

Bah, the bugtracker post was supposed to be a complete rant, but work is clearly exhausting me too much to build up a full head of steam.

Anyway, the original xurble bugtracker is actually available here.