Ben Galbraith

Making the Most of XML

For many of us, XML has become a ubiquitous presence in application development, whether parsing, validating, or manipulating it. For many of us, all
that XML is coupled with pain, in the form of tedious APIs (like, say, the W3C DOM API) and confusing technologies (oh, I don't know, W3C XML
Schema?).

SWT Fundamentals

The Eclipse project's SWT GUI toolkit provides one of the only viable alternatives to Swing for creating so-called rich client applications in Java. Whereas Swing paints its own widgets and has distinguished itself with a complex (and often obtuse) API, SWT relies on the host operating system for widget rendering and sports a simple, clean API. If your goal is to create a Java application that “looks” like a normal Windows application (or OS X, or Linux), SWT will revolutionize your world. In this session, I introduce SWT from the ground up. I start at a high-level, but quickly move into the details of SWT's API. By the presentation's end, attendees will have a solid understanding of SWT.

Advanced SWT and JFace

This session picks up where SWT Fundamentals leaves off. Among the advanced topics I discuss are creating custom SWT widgets and exploring tight
native integration. I combine another compelling topic with the advanced SWT material: JFace. SWT is a more akin to AWT than Swing; its concerned
more with wrapping native functionality than providing any high-level abstractions. JFace is an API on top of SWT that provides such abstractions. The
combination of SWT and JFace is comparable to Swing. My coverage of JFace includes an introduction to several of its frameworks, such as the Viewer
and Window frameworks, along with many examples. Learning JFace will enable you to write complex SWT applications much faster.

Creating Killer Graphics and Professional PDFs with XML

You can do some pretty cool things with XML these days (despite what some curmudgeons in the technology world may claim). In the past few years,
XML has solidified its place as the lingua franca of data sharing and data manipulation. But XML as a data transfer language is only marginally
interesting. Things get really exciting when XML is dynamically transformed into other formats.
In this session, I focus on two XML formats which can be readily transformed into high-quality presentation-centric output formats. XSL-FO is a
typesetting format for XML that can be readily converted into PDF (or Postscript and some other formats). SVG is a vector graphics language in XML –
a sort of open-source version of the popular Macromedia Flash format. SVG files can be converted into beautiful, completely scalable – and interactive -

• images.