Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
At the time I wrote Practical RDF, the folks at HP’s Semantic Web Research Lab were in the process of creating the second major release of Jena, the popular and extremely comprehensive Java RDF API. However, at the time, the release was in pre-alpha state and wasn’t stable enough for inclusion in the book. With the release of the first formal beta of Jena2, the product is now ready for prime time discussion.
In the next week, I’m going to explore differences in the Java classes by porting the book examples over to Jena2. In addition, I’m going to take a look at some of the new features, including that new ontology API that supports OWL. I’ll also run all of my existing RDF/XML documents through the Jena2 parser, ARP2, to see how they fair with the updated parser. Are they still valid with recent RDF specification updates from the Last Call effort? Should be, they validate with the RDF Validator and it’s built on Jena.
I am tempted with this release to install Tomcat on the Wayward Weblogger co-op, so I can use Jena2 with some of my RDF applications. I hestitate, though, because Tomcat can be a drag on resources.