Three months ago I uncovered the existence Haystack project at MIT.  The proponents promised that the code would be made available on the first in June.  Well on June 1st, they made this beast available to the world.  Two things immediately struck me, the size of the download (over 47 megabytes ) and an extremely liberal MIT license!

The project's objective is to be a "universal information client", the same motivation as the CleverCactus product and the Chandler open source project.  It's a pretty ambitious project and has a lot of innovative features. 

The most striking feature is the fact that almost everything is represented in RDF.  The data from information sources, the layout of the visual parts, the programming language and even the "bytecode" is encoded in RDF!  In short, instead of Lists in Lisp you've got RDF everywhere!

Fortunately, the project has adopted a variant of N3 instead of the overly verbose and complicated XML rendition of RDF.  One of the biggest misconceptions about RDF is that its a form of XML.  An XML encoding is actually just one of the multiple ways of rendering RDF. A long time ago I tried to grok the original RDF specification, which happened to be presented in the XML form, let me tell you it was like trying to see the forest while staring at a tree.  Reading an N3 tutorial is such a relief, it'll give you a better appreciation of RDF.

Okay, if you're thinking, "What's in it for me?".  Fortunately, there's a truck load of opensource riches to be found inside Haystack.  The biggest goldmine is the fact that everything is rendered using Eclipse SWT, in otherwords, its just possible to take bits and pieces of this and graft it on to Eclipse. 

You may then ask, why take bits and pieces when I can take the whole thing?  Well, the big problem is that the project is still in the works and has an extremely clunky feel to it.  I would at least say that its farther ahead of Chandler, but CleverCactus is definitely more usable today.   (Note: CleverCactus is written in Swing and it's more responsive, it only proves that there's more to building a responsive GUI than choosing a native GUI framework).

Haystack also has a unique approach to building interfaces, it has something called "User Interface Continuations" and it allows end users to define their own views of RDF.  This stuff is extremely promising, matter of fact a lot of stuff that nakedobjects can learn from.