Another post today (I'm flushing all my "To Blog" entries from the corresponding sticky on my desktop :-)...

I happily discovered, this week, that XUL is no more Mozilla / XPFE only. Many projects are on the way to put XUL into many other platforms like MS IE, Opera, Swig, Mono, and... Eclipse / SWT !!

I found that the last one is very interessant because it opens a new way for Rich Client. Maybe the best way : Eclipse RCP as the Rich Client Platform and XUL as the cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-media interface description language. The only thing I don't like with Eclipse is that we are forced to use the good old method to design interfaces : write code (and XUL was almost the only thing I like in XPFE). And since we have choosen Eclipse RCP as our Rich Client Platform, this news makes me feel good... I knew it would happend :-)

If we can gain from Eclipse as the plaform and XUL as the interface language, I think we can imagine many things (like porting web interface easily to rich client, integration simple XUL apps into Eclipse, make avalable an app from the web or from your Personnal Portal aka Eclipse RCP, etc. :-)

Links :

• Open XUL Alliance (gives lot of ressources and references many XUL motors)
• XSWT : XUL for SWT and Eclipse
• DXULi : a basic XUL interpretor for IE and Opera (seems to work with Safari too)

I've read some time ago an very interesting article about RDF and relationnal databases. I've exactly the same feeling : we all can gain to replace many SQL databases with RDF databases in many contexts.

The article : RDF as database by JBowtie. (the whole blog about semantic web is also interesting)

I would like to see Nuxeo more involved into the semactic web and I'm happy that CPSSchemas will very shortly support RDF so that any document will be able to render as RDF Description.

Imagine... All our CPS indexing their metadatas in an RDF database allowing to search all our content (intranet, blog, extranet, websites, etc.) in a seamless and simple way. Then imagine yourself using OWL to connect all those different metadatas schemas (if they were) or making them evolve, scripting in SPARQL to perform complex query and.... you got the best index / search platform that we ever dreamt ! (I, in fact :-)

Before dreaming I just like to see RDF in CPSSchemas and used in CPS (to put an RDF description, by default, in HTML pages) and maybe the integretion of Zemantic to replace some index of ZCatalog.

Other interesting links :

• Planet RDF

I'm working for some month on RDF and I can remember how difficult was to learn RDF (not really to understand how it works, but what is the real power behind). Here is some links that could be usefull to discover, learn and use RDF.

Discovering RDF :

• Introduction to the Semantic Web and RDF : an excellent tutorial to understand RDF
• What is RDF ? on xml.com

Learn RDF :

• RDF Tutorial on W3CSchools
• RDF Tutorial and Examples
• The RDF page on w3c.org

Some tools to use and work with RDF :

• Sesame : RDF database and engine, our first choice, Java based
• Redland : a full-featured RDF framework, C based, many bindings to use it from other languages, our second choice since the Java binding is still in beta

• Zemantic : RDF Catalog for Zope 3 (use Python RDFLib) [early development stage]
  
• Jena : Java based RDF framework
  
• RDFDB : triple-store written in C

At Indesko we currently use Sesame (for Java based projects) and RDFLib for Python based project. We are monitoring Redland and could switch in the future if it appears to be much better than the other (mainly in term of performances).