It is interesting because Apple has been implementing native peers for the Swing toolkit. This, and the thought that GNU’s Classpath will be doing the same (their work is already underway), is what has kept me wavering between SWT (or Java-Gnome/GTK) and Swing (though, I don’t do a lot of client side programming at all). I think the decision has been made for me now.

SWT seems to be the way into the future for Java client-side development. It might be possible that the Java-Gnome GTK stuff will run on Windows and on a Mac (there are ports underway for the later and the former is already working), but SWT definitely has more momentum. One outstanding reason to use the Java-Gnome stuff, though, would be if you only develop for Gnome or you need a GPL compatible license (since EPL/CPL has been listed as incompatible by the FSF; this would mean if you reference any GPLed program from your code).

Wow. Well, that was big news and a bit disappointing, but at least there are alternatives already out there and thriving… Perhaps this has been in the works for awhile (and might be one reason the SWT port was not picked up by Apple as the Eclipse people would have liked — they want out of everything but the Objective-C business). Oh well… time to start digging into CookSWT I think.

Rollout for the lane-beta site should take place tomorrow morning. I’m still adding in features to the metasearch and Phil has come up with a good way to leverage the hit count database I keep so I hope to implement that next. Turns out we are going to wait on the statistics and see how much parameter data we can get from WebTrends. The search will keep logging usage in its database just in case we need to go that route though.

Overall, I think we can breathe a sigh of relief. Now it is just a matter of fixing the small things, making minor tweaks, and then eventually getting some more user feedback to guide future improvements. There are still engines to add into the metasearch though so that should keep me busy for awhile.

Oh, and for future reference (why I added this post)… a nice tool for debugging: jvmstat. That’s probably just a temporary link, but hey aren’t they all? Why am I adding a temporary link here? Good question self. I should be logging it in a link logger. Oh well, I’ll do that too.

I’m now working on a statistics module so we can see how people use the site. Nothing fancy… just dump results from the database into Excel spreadsheets so that people can manipulate the data on their own. This should be a useful addition to the data we can get from WebTrends.

In particular, my module should make it easier to parse out which licensed resources are being used with which search terms, which might prove an interesting area for future work/improvements. Right now we are using data from our database, but I wonder how much can be manipulated out of the WebTrends data… perhaps with a little post-processing to make it more user-friendly.

Everything else with the federated search seems pretty stable at this point.

Still, until recently, we (the library) managed our own servers and it feels a bit strange to leave it in someone else’s hands. If it works on the development and stage servers, though, it should work on the production one, right?