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XML and Web Services In The News - 22 January 2007
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Sun Microsystems
HEADLINES:
Enhancements to B2MML Now Available for Review
Editorial Team, Processingtalk.com
WBF and ISA have announced that the Business To Manufacturing Markup
Language (B2MML) v04 Release Candidate 2 schemas and documentation are
now available on the WBF XML Working Group internal website. This
represents a major enhancement of B2MML; including support for ISA-95
Part 5 Transactions, OAGIS messages and UN/Cefact core components while
still maintaining backward compatibility to V0300. Documents are
available for review until February 9, 2007. This version includes
several major enhancements including: 1) Support for ISA-95 Part 5
Transactions has been added to support a wider range of integration
problems. 2) Message headers, commands, and formats are consistent with
OAGIS transaction message formats, significantly reducing end user and
vendor costs for system integration. 3) Support for UN/Cefact Core
Components aids in interoperability with other XML vocabularies, such as
the OAGIS 9.0 schemas. B2MML was developed by the WBF XML Working Group
to provide manufacturing companies with a freely available XML Schema
implementation of the ISA-95 Enterprise - Control System Integration
Standard. The ISA-95 standard provides models and terminology to
standardise the integration of enterprise systems and manufacturing
control systems. The standard has been adopted by manufacturing
companies as a framework for planning and designing integration
projects. B2MML provides an IT ready implementation of the ISA-95
standard and has become the defacto implementation vehicle for ISA-95
based projects. The consistency of the ISA-95 and OAGIS transactions is
an example of the continued impact of the Manufacturing Interoperability
Guideline Working Group, a collaborative effort between OAGI, WBF, ISA,
MIMOSA, and OPC Foundation. The objective of the Manufacturing
Interoperability Guideline Working Group is to develop an industry
guideline that defines generic business process models between the
operations management and business layers of the manufacturing support
system. WBF and ISA are also members of The Automation Federation, an
umbrella organization under which associations and societies engaged in
manufacturing and process automation activities can work more
effectively to fulfill their missions.
See also: the B2MML web site
Introduction to Ajax for Page Authors
Ed Ort, Sun Developer Article
Ajax is currently the primary technique for driving the high
responsiveness and interactivity of some of the most popular applications
on the web such as Google Maps and Flickr. These applications are
representative of a new generation of highly responsive, highly
interactive web applications, referred to as Web 2.0 applications, that
often involve users collaborating online and sharing content. Ajax has
different implications for developers working in different roles. For
example, component developers creating custom components for web
applications build Ajax functionality into the design. Page authors use
these Ajax components, along with widgets, JavaScript technology, and
other techniques, to incorporate Ajax functionality into their web
applications. Ajax impacts other roles too. For example, enterprise
application developers need to add logic in server-side components to
handle Ajax-related requests directed to the server. You can add Ajax
functionality to a web page in many ways. In general, these approaches
vary in the amount of JavaScript code you need to incorporate into the
page. Some approaches, such as using Ajax-enabled JavaServer Faces
components, encapsulate the JavaScript code in the component, so you
don't have to do any JavaScript coding. Other approaches, such as using
widgets from the Dojo toolkit, provide some of the JavaScript code. In
still other approaches, you do most or all of the JavaScript coding.
Choose the approach or combination of approaches that best fits the
functional requirements of your web application and with which you're
most comfortable. This article focuses on page authors and describes
various techniques that you can use to add Ajax functionality to a web
page.
OSDL, Free Standards Group Merge to Form Linux Foundation
China Martens, InfoWorld
The two main evangelizers of the Linux operating system, Open Source
Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG) are merging
to form the Linux Foundation. The two industry consortiums announced
that they're in the final stages of combining their respective
operations, according to Jim Zemlin, who will head the Linux Foundation.
He was the FSG's executive director. With Linux now an established
operating system presence for embedded, desktop and server systems,
the primary evangelizing mission that the OSDL and FSG embarked upon
in 2000 has come to an end, Zemlin said. The focus for the foundation
going forward is on what the organization can do to help the Linux
community more effectively compete with its primary operating system
rival Microsoft. Interoperability is a key area to work on as is
backward compatibility between newer and older Linux releases, Zemlin
said. At the same time, the foundation will look to expand the legal
protection it offers developers and continue to provide a "safe haven"
for Linux kernel developers, including the creator of the operating
system Linus Torvalds. Within the open-source community, the
establishments of foundations to act as focal points to work on
particular areas of technologies is an ongoing trend. The intention
is that the Linux Foundation will become the go-to place for Linux
development in the same way that the Eclipse Foundation is already the
center of tools development, the Apache Software Foundation the hub of
Web server and middleware work and Mozilla Foundation the heart of
browser and Web interface creation. The OSDL and FSG always worked
closely together and had discussed merging on several occasions. There
was a fair amount of overlap in members between the OSDL and FSG. The
Linux Foundation staffed by 45 full-time employees and contractors
will begin life with some 70 members including software vendors such
as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, Oracle, and Red Hat as well as
universities and end users.
See also: the announcement
WS-ResourceTransfer Update
Ian Robinson, Blog
In 2006 IBM, Microsoft, HP and Intel announced an initiative to unify
the WSDM and WS-Management standards supporting service management.
This initiative includes the unification of the infrastructure that
underpins WSDM and WS-Management. I'm the editor of the first
specification published (in August 2006) as part of that initiative —
WS-ResourceTransfer (WS-RT) — which defines a Web service retrieval
and update protocol for manageable resources. This specification took
as its inputs the WS-Transfer W3C member submission and the
WS-ResourceFramework (WSRF) OASIS standard; our goal is to bring
together the two communities using these specifications, and those that
build on them, At the time of writing the most recent activity on this
specification was the public feedback workshop held in Cupertino, CA,
on 6 December 2006. The feedback we received was generally very
positive and will be factored in a future revision of this
specification. A foilset that describes the WS-RT specification and
the feedback we received is available through the WS-RT Workshop
YahooGroup web site.
See also: WS-RT references
An Interesting Offer: Get Paid to Contribute to Wikipedia
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Opinion
I was a little surprised to receive email a couple of days ago from
Microsoft saying they wanted to contract someone independent but
friendly (me) for a couple of days to provide more balance on Wikipedia
concerning ODF/OOXML. I am hardly the poster boy of Microsoft
partisanship! Apparently they are frustrated at the amount of spin from
some ODF stakeholders on Wikipedia and blogs. I think I'll accept it:
FUD enrages me and MS certainly are not hiring me to add any pro-MS FUD,
just to correct any errors I see. If anyone sees any examples of
incorrect statements on Wikipedia or other similar forums in the next
few weeks, please let me know: whether anti-OOXML or anti-ODF. In fact,
I already had added some material to Wikipedia several months ago, so
it is not something new, so I'll spend a couple of days mythbusting and
adding more information. Just scanning quickly the Wikipedia entry for
OOXML, I see one example straight away: The OOXML specification requires
conforming implementations to accept and understand various legacy
office applications . But the conformance section to the ISO standard
(which is only about page four) specifies conformance in terms of
being able to accept the grammar, use the standard semantics for the
bits you implement, and document where you do something different. The
bits you don't implement are no-one's business. So that entry is simply
wrong. Now I certainly think there are some good issues to consider
with ODF versus OOXML, and it is good that they come out an get
discussed. As I have mentioned before on this blog, I think OOXML has
attributes that distinguish it: ODF has simply not been designed with
the goal of being able to represent all the information possible in an
MS Office document; this makes it poorer for archiving but paradoxically
may make it better for level-playing-field, inter-organization document
interchange. But the archiving community deserves support just as much
as the document distribution community. And XHTML is better than both
for simple documents. And PDF still has a role. And specific markup
trumps all of them, where it is possible. So I think there are
distinguishing features for OOXML, and one of the more political issues
is do we want to encourage and reward MS for taking the step of opening
up their file formats, at last?
Making XML in a Rails App
Deepak Vohra, XML.com
Ruby on Rails is a database-based web framework. An XML document may
be created and parsed with Ruby on Rails. Rails provides a Ruby
library called Builder to generate XML markup. The Builder package
contains class Builder::XmlMarkup to generate an XML document. In this
article, we will create an XML document from a database table with the
Builder library. Before installing Builder, we need to install the Ruby
on Rails framework and RubyGems, the standard Ruby package manager.
We also need to install the MySQL database for creating an XML document
from the database. Then we will create an XML document from a database
table as a Rails application.
OpenID and SAML: A Swirling Nexus
Eve Maler, XML Grrl Blog
A bunch of us who are involved in OpenID, SAML, XRI, and Liberty
identity web services took advantage of our relative proximity this past
week and got together just prior to the Portland OpenID Mashpit to
discuss the proposition: Where and how can we move from incompatibility
to convergence? Besides myself, on hand were gracious JanRain host Scott
Kveton, his colleague Jason McKerr (who ably talked me and my car down
from a precarious position on a steep icy street), RL "Bob" Morgan of
Shibboleth fame, OpenID maven David Recordon, XRI guru Drummond Reed,
his colleague (and my fellow songwriter) Laurie Rae, and SAMLista Jeff
Hodges of Neustar. I hope these folks will speak up to correct any
details I've gotten wrong here. I've supplemented with a ton of links
that weren't in my original notes so as to make this post as directly
useful as possible... There are lots of reasons to be striving for
better compatibility and more convergence. SAML and Liberty technologies
have deliberately stayed the heck away from questions of user
experience, which OpenID is exploring in rapid, consensus-driven fashion
as an essential part of its innovations around web-friendly identifiers.
OpenID has deliberately stayed the heck away from being a trust system,
a challenge that Liberty has met head-on with technology, public policy,
and business needs in mind. The growth curve of OpenID has been truly
staggering, but in the realm of lightly protected data and lightweight
applications so far. SAML and Liberty have an adoption pattern that is
both deep and wide, but is typically enterprise-heavy and not intended
for "promiscuous" open-Internet use (though there are notable
exceptions, such as ProtectNetwork and OpenIdP). OpenID has already been
through a convergence trend, incorporating XRI and Yadis and being
influenced by several other systems. SAML has done the same, with
Shibboleth profiles and Liberty's federation work ultimately coming to
rest in SAML2. A lot of complementarity here, yes? There are some jobs
they both tackle to varying degrees today — namely identity provider
discovery, service metadata, and authentication services — though their
knobs and dials for security and ease of deployment are tuned to
different settings.
Comparison: OpenID and SAML
Jeff Hodges, Draft Technical Report Version -00
This document presents a brief comparison of OpenID and SAML. For the
most part, the comparison is between OpenID 2.0 and SAML 2.0, although
there are some mentions of prior versions of each. The comparison
addresses technical features, breadth of addressed use cases, and
attributes of the specification sets. OpenID, both 1.X and 2.0, and
SAML 1.X and 2.0, offer functionality quite similar to each other.
Obvious differentiators are the message encodings, security mechanisms,
and overall profile flows — OpenID specifies a flow that no present
single SAML profile congruently matches. However, we note that it is
distinctly possible to relatively easily craft a new SAML profile that
incorporates the deltas between OpenID and, say, the SAML Web Browser
SSO profile. At the time of writing this document, OpenID 2.0 was a
draft specification set. There are claimed to be multiple alpha/beta
implementations; SAML 2.0 was approved as an OASIS Standard in March
2005. There are multiple certified interoperable implementations
including at least two open source ones. OpenID 2.0 specifies a concrete
web SSO protocol, IDP discovery protocol, principal identifier format,
an extensibility mechanism (e.g. for attribute exchange), security
considerations, and backwards compatibility in a single draft
specification. SAML specifies an abstract extensible security assertion
and an abstract extensible request-response protocol via XML schemas, in
one specification, the SAML "core"; SAML protocol bindings and concrete
profiles are defined in further specifications in the spec set. The
OpenID specfication does not explicitly support profiling in the sense
that the SAML specification set does. The OpenID specification set is
concretely bound to HTTP and concretely defines a single web SSO profile.
However, it does feature a simple extensibility mechanism, supporting
definition of specific data query and response for name/value pairs.
Concrete SAML profiles — one per each specific use-case, e.g., Vanilla
web browser SSO, enhanced-client SSO, IDP discovery, Single Logout, name
identifier management and mapping, assertion query/response, attribute
query/response — are specified in the "SAML profiles" specification.
Note that SAML profiles are specified using, or "on top of" SAML bindings.
A given profile may be designed to utilize more than one binding, e.g.,
the Web SSO profile, or may be designed to use just one particular
binding, e.g. as the SAML Lightweight Web Browser SSO (lSSO) Profile.
See also: the OASIS SSTC
Sun Jumps On
Robert Mullins, InfoWorld.com
Sun Microsystems is joining in the pricing pig pile atop Red Hat, the
leading Linux software company. Sun said last week that it will join the
likes of Oracle and Microsoft to challenge Red Hat's open source
dominance. Sun's strategy includes support for its free download of
Solaris 10, a Unix-based operating system, that will cost 40 percent to
50 percent less than comparable support for Red Hat's Linux operating
system. Red Hat, the largest Linux distributor, has faced other price
competition of late, notably an October move by database software
company Oracle. In November, operating system giant Microsoft aligned
itself with Novell, a rival Linux distributor to Red Hat. Sun's Solaris
annual support contracts range from $240 to $1,180 for one- or
two-socket x86 servers, depending on whether the buyer chooses the
'basic' or 'premium' plan. Red Hat Linux ES basic goes for $349 per
year, per system, and Red Hat Linux AS premium costs $2,499. Sun is
competing on value, not just price, said Rich Green, executive vice
president of Sun's software division: "We wouldn't be working at a loss,
I assure you; the scale and volume that we have allows us to place bets
on what we would need to support them." Green also dismissed published
reports that Sun was considering releasing Solaris under the GNU General
Public License Version 3, clearing the way for integrations with other
open source projects.
See also: the announcement
Crossing Borders: Closures
Bruce Tate, IBM developerWorks
Closures are blocks of code that can be used as arguments to functions
and methods. The programming construct has long been a staple of
languages such as Lisp, Smalltalk, and Haskell. The Java community has
resisted closures so far, even as competing languages such as C# add
them. This article explores whether closures represent unnecessary
complexity for a language for a little convenience, or something more.
Some believe that the extra complexity that closures will add to the
language is not worth it. Their argument is that a little convenience
is not worth the price of corrupting the simplicity of syntactic sugar.
Others believe that closures will enable a new wave of design patterns.
Ultimately, for the best possible answers to the question, you need to
cross borders to learn how programmers use closures in other languages.
In the past, closures were never a serious priority for Java developers.
In the early years, the Java designers did not support closures because
Java users were skittish about automatically allocating the variables
on the heap without an explicit new. Today, a tremendous debate
circulates around including closures into the base language. In recent
years, practical interest in dynamic languages such as Ruby, JavaScript,
and even Lisp has led to a groundswell of support for closures in the
Java language. It looks like we'll finally get closures in Java 1.7.
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