One of the challenges with this work is that Yahoo has not given these widgets a particularly easy name to throw around, but here’s a picture to help explain things:

The text appears in a search result for Ultravox in London at the Roundhouse and as you can see it includes the usual snippet of text (or the event summary, if its longer) plus some very simple name value pairs – “Location” and “Starts”, which is altered to “Started” for events that have already started.

The idea is to answer the basic when and where questions common to events and also to allow users to quickly scan through search results and exclude events that they cannot attend and focus on those that they can attend, which is obviously those that they aren’t already missing! Therefore the “Starts” vs “Started” thing.

“Generic”

I can’t see a single person outside of the RDFa fan-club using this plugin unless it supports a wide variety of different sites and subject areas. There is no advantage to me in putting out something that only works for FeelItLive.com, yet its only FeelItLive.com that I’m aware of that is publishing VCal RDFa and Yahoo do not allow wildcards. I want people to use it, because I want them to focus their attention on my search results.

Chicken, meet Egg.

So, I’m doing two things:

• Labelling the thing generic – there is no point even mentioning FIL in the promotional blurb. It can only confuse matters.

• Inviting anyone and everyone to attach a comment to this post letting me know where they have published VCal RDFa. If they do that, I’ll do my best to support as many sites as Yahoo will allow.

I’ll also extend the same invitation to users of similar vocabularies (Edit: iCal, Event ontology, event microformats etc), though Vcal is the one recommended by Yahoo so I’ll have to see if anything else is supported.

Highlights include:

• Static helper methods for boilerplate XML operations.
• Straightforward implementations of NamespaceManagers for use with XPath operations – including one which scans the target document for namespace/prefix bindings.
• A simple way to assign categories to items and extract simple frequency count stats (and a TableModel for the data)
• Swing dialog implementations for displaying error messages and OK cancel prompts.
• an isNullOrEmpty(String str) method as featured in .NET.

There is a binary JAR and a source JAR. I’m using the following dependency definition:

      <dependency>
          <groupId>com.cantorva</groupId>
          <artifactId>libraries</artifactId>
          <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
      </dependency>

WordPress mangled the filenames slightly during upload, but the following command sequence addresses that and installs to your local repository:

mkdir cantorvaLibs
cd cantorvaLibs/
curl http://cantorva.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/libraries-001-snapshot.jar > libraries-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
mvn install:install-file -Dfile=libraries-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar -DgroupId=com.cantorva -DartifactId=libraries -Dversion=0.0.1-SNAPSHOT -Dpackaging=jar
rm libraries-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
cd ..
rmdir cantorvaLibs/