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XML and Web Services In The News - 12 January 2007
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
Widget Description Exchange Service (WIDEX) Requirements
Vlad Stirbu and Dave Raggett (eds), IETF Internet Draft
Members of the IETF Widget Description Exchange Service (WIDEX) Working
Group have released an updated "Widget Description Exchange Service
(WIDEX) Requirements" specification. The document defines functional
requirements for a framework and a protocol used to support XML-based
user interfaces, where the user interface and application logic may be
on different machines, and coupled via an exchange of XML DOM events
and update/mutation operations. Two primary Entities are described as
follows: (1) Widex Server (WS) — the entity that holds the application
logic; (2) Widex Renderer (WR) — the entity that renders the user
interface. One of the goals is to define Widex Objects (WO) that are
used to convey information about interface updates and events. Widex
Objects are used to keep the rendered user interface synchronised with
the application logic. Access to services at anytime, from anywhere,
using any device are being developed using Web technologies such as
XML and distributed across the network rather than resident on any one
device. An example is a service to access flight arrival times, where
the user interface expressed in XHTML is rendered on a client device,
the application logic runs on a remote server and a technique as user
interface remoting is used to keep the user interface synchronized
with the application logic. What is currently lacking is a convenient
means for continous fine grained synchronization rather than the one
provided by a request/response protocol (e.g. HTTP) for Web pages,
which occurs in between page loads. The IETF WiDeX (Widget Description
Exchange Service) Working Group seeks to define a light weight
mechanism used in an IP-based network for remoting user interfaces
where the user interface is represented in XML, and synchronization
involves XML DOM events and XML DOM mutation/update operations.
See also: the WiDeX Framework
IBM and Microsoft Submit MTOM Serialization Policy Assertion (WS-MTOMPolicy) to W3C
Christopher Ferris, Kirill Gavrylyuk (et al.), W3C Member Submission
W3C recently acknowledged receipt of a Member Submission from IBM and
Microsoft for the "MTOM Serialization Policy Assertion (WS-MTOMPolicy)"
specification. The submission describes a domain-specific policy
assertion that indicates endpoint support of the optimized MIME
multipart/related serialization of SOAP messages defined in section 3
of the "SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM)"
specification. This policy assertion can be specified within a policy
alternative as defined in WS-Policy Framework and attached to a WSDL
description as defined in WS-PolicyAttachment. The companies have
suggested that the Consortium make the submission available for
consideration by members or other third parties, and that the W3C
consider this submission as the basis for a W3C Recommendation or
Working Group Note from the XML Protocol Working Group if in the future
WS-MTOMPolicy is within the scope of the XMLP WG charter. This
specification intends to meet the following requirements: (1) Indicate
that messages are encoded as described in section 3 of the SOAP Message
Transmission Optimization Mechanism using MIME multipart/related (RFC
2387) and XML-binary Optimized Packaging (XOP); (2) Indicate the use
of MTOM independent of transport; (3) Provide attribute extensibility
for more sophisticated and/or currently unanticipated scenarios; (4)
Support a variety of encoding formats including both SOAP 1.1 and SOAP
1.2 Envelopes. W3C next steps: the W3C Team plans to notify the Web
Services Coordination Group of this Member Submission; it is expected
that the Submission will be used as input for the XML Protocol Working
Group.
See also: the W3C Staff comment
A Structure for Unstructured Data Search
Greg Goth, IEEE Distributed Systems Online
An often-repeated technology industry truism holds that 80 percent of
enterprise data resides in unstructured formats such as text files,
email, video documents, and audio samples. It's rare, however, to find
a concrete example of the need to access that data. A sterling case
showed up on 1 December 2006, when changes in the US Federal Rules of
Civil Procedure went into effect. These arcane laws are usually an
intellectual parsing ground for attorneys, but this particular set of
amendments addressed the rules of legal discovery for electronic data.
Discovery rules cover information-sharing protocols between court
adversaries, and they suggest how lucrative the market for advanced
technologies to search unstructured data is becoming. 'Expectations
are growing,' says David Ferrucci, senior manager of the semantics
analysis and integration group at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research
Center. Ferruci is the lead architect ofthe Unstructured Information
Management Architecture, a software development framework developed
at IBM to help realize this value. IBM made UIMA open source in mid-
2005, posting it to Sourceforge. Then, in early December 2006, IBM
joined with some of the technology industry's other leading
governmental and academic sector players to form the UIMA Technical
Committee at the Organization for the Advancement of Structured
Information Standards. The UIMA framework was transferred to the
Apache Foundation's incubator concurrent with the formation of the
OASIS committee. IBM does have some competition within the realm of
unstructured data search, but Ferrucci says the idea behind open
sourcing UIMA was to offer the architecture to a wide variety of
vertical industries, hoping developers with domain expertise will
be able to write the appropriate content analytic components. Some
IBM products already deploy UIMA capabilities, and a few small
companies have emerged with UIMA-compliant analysis applications.
However, the UIMA effort is still new enough that much of the
analysis and recovery sector is just discovering its principles.
See also: UIMA references
Eclipse Reaches Out, Joins Three Groups
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
The Eclipse Foundation has extended its reach into the open-source
and broader Java development communities by joining a trio of
organizations: the Java Community Process, the Object Management
Group and the Open Services Gateway initiative Alliance. With the new
moves, Eclipse is reaching out and expanding its substantial base of
supporters in the Java space and beyond. Despite joining multiple
organizations, Milinkovich acknowledges that the JCP news is the
biggest piece of the triple play of new memberships. The JCP is led
by Sun Microsystems, and Eclipse has courted Sun to become a member of
the foundation — even offering to change the name of the organization
if Sun were to join. With OMG, the Eclipse membership could be viewed
as a tit-for-tat situation, as OMG has been a member of the Eclipse
Foundation since its inception. Indeed, OMG sponsored the first annual
EclipseCon conference in Anaheim, Calif. This year's EclipseCon will
be held March 5-8 in Santa Clara, Calif. Meanwhile, joining the OSGi
Alliance is a natural move for Eclipse, as the OSGi framework
specification forms the basis of the Eclipse Runtime. And the runtime
is fully based on the OSGi notion of "bundle," which is equivalent to
Eclipse plug-ins. In addition, the OSGi work at Eclipse is the basis
of the Eclipse Equinox project. Equinox is an implementation of the
OSGi R4 core framework specification, a set of bundles that implement
various optional OSGi services and other infrastructure for running
OSGi-based systems.
See also: the announcement
The Open Group Announces Release of Version One of the Universal Data
Element Framework (UDEF)
Staff, Open Group Announcement
The Open Group, a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium focused on
open standards and global interoperability within and between
enterprises, today announced the release of Version One of the Universal
Data Element Framework (UDEF), a standard way of indexing enterprise
information. UDEF Version One contains the definitions that will enable
enterprises to index many commonly-used information items. UDEF will be
extended over time, and future versions will cover more and more
information used by different kinds of enterprises. UDEF as well as its
future development are managed by The Open Group's UDEF Forum which is
comprised of such companies as Capgemini, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon.
UDEF simplifies information management through consistent classification
and assignment of a global standard identifier to the data names and
then relating them to similar data element concepts defined by other
organizations. Though this approach is a small part of the overall
picture, it is potentially a crucial enabler of semantic interoperability.
See also: the web site
The Service-Oriented Marriage of Grid and Business Processes
Lipika Sahoo, SearchWebServices.org
Large scale aggregation and sharing of heterogeneous components,
computational nodes and mass storage/data centers powered by their
integration through intelligent process management techniques has led to
widespread acceptance of the grid computing paradigm. This "cluster and
conquer" model of computing has simplified the processing of CPU- and
memory-intensive applications. Grid computing concepts have come a long
way since they were first explored in the I-WAY experiment back in 1995.
Extensive research and developments have resulted in successful
implementations of grids across large bandwidth networks. A key concern,
however at this point could be the design approach that an effective
grid solution should adhere to. While the top down approach is more
business-centric, the bottom up approach is more sensitive to
implementation details and low-level realities. The latter has been the
most preferred and utilized design approach for grid middleware. Let us
try to examine the reasons behind the widespread use of the bottom up
approach as compared to the top down approach.
Defining SOA as an Architectural Style
Boris Lublinsky, IBM developerWorks
This article discusses SOA as an architectural style, exploring major
elements of this style and their interactions. It looks at the
rationale behind this style and its differentiation from the other
popular approaches for building enterprise architecture. The author
also touches upon a pattern language that you can use for understanding
and simplifying the implementation of this style. There is a lot of
talk about SOA, yet very little agreement on what this popular three-
letter acronym actually means. With many competing definitions, it's
hard to decipher its true essence. SearchWebServices.com announced a
contest for the best definition and received a slew of submissions.
There was little chance of selecting a single "best" definition because
SOA means different things to different people. Both business and
technical leaders alike are interested in SOA, considering it a silver
bullet for achieving better alignment between business and IT, creating
more flexible and responsive IT infrastructure, and simplifying
integration implementation. It is strongly believed that "SOA allows
you to align the business world with the world of information
technology (IT) in a way that makes both more effective. SOA is a
bridge that creates a symbiotic and synergistic relationship between
the two that is more powerful and valuable than anything that was
experienced in the past. Moreover, SOA is about the business results
that can be achieved from having better alignment between the business
and IT. At the heart of BPM is the notion of orchestration, where a
process engine orchestrates several manual and automatic process steps
while manipulating input/output data. SOA makes the realization of BPM
more practical. Business processes in SOA facilitate the next phase
of business process evolution from merely automated to managed
flexibility. The goal of SOA is to expose an organization's computing
assets as reusable business services, implementing basic business
functions, which can be (re)used and integrated more readily using
business processes. Such ability to rapidly assemble or reassemble
solutions using existing services is one of the main advantages of SOA.
See also: SOA references
Ubuntu 6.10, OpenSUSE 10.2 Rise to Microsoft's Vista Challenge
Jason Brooks, eWEEK
While the eyes of the IT world have spent years squinting to see
Microsoft's slowly unfolding vistas, the companies and individuals that
drive open source have been steadily building a case for broader
adoption of Linux-based operating systems. Two of the best all-around
Linux distributions to emerge from this process are OpenSUSE 10.2 and
Ubuntu 6.10, both of which bundle together the best of what open
source has to offer into operating systems that merit consideration
for desktop and (some) server workloads. Ubuntu 6.10, also known as
Edgy Eft, is the latest release in the popular line of Linux operating
systems from Canonical. Ubuntu is a fairly young distribution, but its
roots in Debian give it a solid foundation — both in terms of its code
and in its community of users. This strong foundation is most evident
in Ubuntu's excellent software management tools and wide catalog of
prepackaged software. The strengths of Novell's OpenSUSE 10.2 are
rooted in the operating system's history. OpenSUSE 10.2, which began
shipping in December, descends from the retail-marketed SUSE Linux,
which was long positioned as a direct rival to Windows. As a result,
OpenSUSE contains GUI-friendly features such as the Yast suite of
configuration tools. What's more, SUSE's background as a direct rival
to Red Hat in the enterprise server space means that OpenSUSE ships
with high-end elements — such as AppArmor security and Xen
virtualization support — that Ubuntu does not offer right out of the
box. eWEEK Labs believes that either Ubuntu 6.10 or OpenSUSE 10.2 is
worthy of replacing Windows XP as a desktop operating system, provided
the distros support your target hardware. The Ubuntu installation
disk doubles as a LiveCD environment from which users can ensure that
Version 6.10 supports their hardware before installing it to their
hard drives.
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