" All of the clients and the web post friendly things like about 2 hours ago. Can anyone provide a standard routine for converting the pure date element into these english strings?"
take a look at the way Rails does it as well, http://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/actionpack/lib/action_view/helpers/date_helper.rb It's quite a common thing, so perhaps you should look at the source for Struts, or some similar java framework, see if you can steal the code directly from there.
