One of the great things about using native widgets, such as with SWT, is that the widgets can display with the current operating/windowing system theme. However, by default applications use the legacy Windows look and feel. For such applications use of themes requires an application manifest to be provided (details here).

In the Eclipse world this typically means adding a manifest to javaw.exe. Unfortunately Sun has chosen for native applications to use the legacy Windows look and feel, by not including the manifest with it. In order to use the current theme the SWT team have tried to make things easier, but doing so requires you to do the following (for Windows XP and later): (more…)

In building applications to allow end-users to manage information in an intuitive manner (from multiple sources), we, the Haystack and Simile projects, have over time moved to using the W3C’s Semantic Web framework and RDF standard for sharing data and using as application’s backends. Using RDF does require us to either build or find an easily deployable and high-performance data-store, and we have therefore planned an in-depth ‘RDF DB Shootout’. Preliminary results indicate that the Sesame Native store to have the best performance.

(more…)