The book "Programming Firefox" arrived, and the timing was good; I'm considering the possibility of using a XUL-based application for the editors to access the database, because it would allow more flexibility in terms of local file access and storage. I started working through the early chapters, and reading around the later ones to figure out how practical it is to deploy a XUL-based application right now. It seems quite feasible, although the standalone XULRunner app is still a developer preview at this point. I'll keep working through the book, because I can see lots of possibilities for an effective GUI using Firefox/Gecko.

Also spent some time looking for ways to batch-convert my growing collection of SVG GUI icons to PNGs for GUI building in Java and XUL. ImageMagick looked promising, but it does a lousy job of converting SVGs; they come out without colours. The GIMP does a good job of conversion, but isn't batch-scriptable. This needs more investigation.