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XML and Web Services In The News - 25 January 2007
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Sun Microsystems
HEADLINES:
Liberty Alliance is Alive And Kicking
Joris Evers, CNET News.com
Launched in 2001 to outflank Microsoft's Passport service for checking
people's online identities, the Liberty Alliance is alive and kicking
while Passport is mostly history. even though Microsoft's Passport
fizzled, there are plenty of other identity efforts under way.
Attracting the most attention are IBM and Novell, which have put their
weight behind an open-source effort called Higgins. Also, Microsoft is
back in force: Windows Vista includes a feature called CardSpace meant
to let people control identity information. From the interview with
Roger Sullivan, Liberty's newly appointed president: "Liberty Alliance
is an assembly of both enterprise customers as well as vendors from all
around the world. We have come together to develop open standards for
identity management. Historically, all of those standards have focused
on federation protocols, one enterprise interacting with another
enterprise in a secure way and being able to exchange identity
credentials from one enterprise to the other... We think Higgins solves
legitimate problems, complementary to Liberty. The average person on
the street or even the average enterprise CXO (the X being whatever
position one holds) isn't going to be able to articulate exactly where
Higgins is complementary to Liberty or where it overlaps. That requires
more inclusion, and the attitude on our part to reach across the aisle
and, with Higgins, clarify for what they do well and what we do well...
Division does nobody in the industry any good because customers, at
the end of the day, want to figure out how to make CardSpace
interoperate with other infrastructures. We fully recognize that
CardSpace will be a way that customers authenticate into a federated
environment. We have to figure out how they work together, and we have
to be able to articulate that common vision and purpose to the
marketplace... today we're moving beyond the technology standards. It
is a fact that CardSpace will be on millions of desktops with the advent
of Windows Vista. It will be there so one has to figure out how to
interoperate with it as an identity provider. Beyond that, there's an
attitudinal shift that I think is really important. Around the world,
in privacy groups, government agencies, vendors and enterprise customers,
there is interest in identity. This is not accidental, I think that
there's demand that is leading us toward the knee of the hockey stick
in the identity space.
See also: Liberty Alliance references
OASIS WS-Transaction (almost) a Standard
Mark Little, Blog
The OASIS WS-TX technical committee held a face-to-face meeting last
week at IBM Hursely. This is likely the last such meeting prior to
final standardisation of WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and
WS-BusinessActivity. It has been a long struggle to get here, dating
back to extended transaction work at the OMG, a first attempt at Web
Services standardisation via BTP and OASIS WS-CAF (where there is a
lot of overlap due to history). This meeting was primarily just making
sure that all of the i's were dotted and t's crossed and getting
agreement to progress to OASIS standard; all of the heavy work had been
done over the past 12 months. This is an important step for enterprise
Web Services deployments for a number of reasons: (1)
WS-AtomicTransaction defines a traditional ACID transactions model,
based on two-phase commit (2PC). Many people believe that 2PC is not
right for the loosely coupled nature of Web Services and they'd be
right. However, this overlooks the other important aspect of Web
Services: interoperability. Interoperability between existing vendor
implementations is key for many transaction processing deployments,
particularly those that have grown via acquisitions of heterogeneous
technologies. This has been a transaction processing holy grail for
many years. (2) WS-BusinessActivity provides a forward compensation
model, much more appropriate for loosely coupled, long duration
interactions. This latter model will probably have slower take-up than
WS-AtomicTransaction, but it should become more important over time.
Once we finalise WS-Security and WS-Reliable Exchange we'll finally
be able to do secure, reliable and transacted Web Services in a
standard manner.
See also: the OASIS WS-TX web site
'oXygen' NVDL (Namespace-based Validation Dispatching Language) Editor
Staff, Syncro Soft Ltd Announcement
Syncro Soft Ltd, the producer of "oXygen" XML Editor, has announced the
immediate availability of version 8.1 of its XML Editor, Schema Editor
and XSLT/XQuery Debugger. Version 8.1 of the "oXygen" XML Editor
improves the support for NVDL scripts and adds a series of enhancements,
fixes and component updates. The new "oXygen" NVDL (Namespace-based
Validation Dispatching Language) editor allows you to visually edit NVDL
scripts. A diagram showing the script structure and allowing navigation
from a mode reference to its definition is available. When editing an
NVDL script the content completion offers assistance for entering a mode
reference by presenting the defined modes and for entering a new mode by
presetting the modes used but not defined. Also the NVDL schema that
drives the content completion was annotated, so you will get documentation
for the proposals offered during editing. Using the tool one may edit
and validate support for XML Schema (visual diagram), Relax NG (visual
diagram), NVDL scripts, DTD, Schematron. It is available as standalone
desktop or Java Web Start application, or as an Eclipse plugin. It
supports multiple validation engines, including: Xerces, XSV, LIBXML,
MSXML 4.0, MSXML.NET, Saxon SA, SQC. A new XQuery Input View has been
added. When editing an XQuery file, "oXygen" detects the documents used
as inputs and presents a simplified outline for each one. The input view
can analyse documents that are stored on the local file system. You can
use the Drag and Drop triggered popup menu to easily create XQuery FLWOR
constructs or XPath expressions. You can copy and paste sections of
tabular data between Microsoft Excel and the XML Grid Editor. This allow
an easy import of tabular data into an XML structure and, respectively,
an easy export of tabular data from an XML document to Excel. Other new
features include indexing support for Berkeley XML DB, custom format of
calendar dates for import operations, update to Xerces-J parser 2.9.0 and
support for SVN version 1.4.
See also: Namespace-based Validation Dispatching Language (NVDL)
Oracle's 'Web 2.0' Interface Coming This Month
James Niccolai, InfoWorld
Oracle plans to release WebCenter Suite before the end of the month,
a product for building application interfaces that incorporate content
from a variety of sources as well as "Web 2.0" tools such as blogs and
wikis. The software aims to make workers more productive by providing
access to a variety of content and services from one screen, so they
don't have to flip between different applications. Other vendors
including IBM and Microsoft are working on similar functionality.
Oracle announced WebCenter Suite at its OpenWorld conference in October
2006. It will be sold as an add-on to Oracle Application Server
Enterprise Edition for $50,000 per CPU. At the heart of the product is
WebCenter Framework, a technology based on Java Server Faces that lets
developers embed AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) components,
portlets, and other content into a user interface. The suite also
includes WebCenter Services, for embedding services such as Oracle
Enterprise Search, VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calling and
wiki-building tools into the interface. For example, a manager's
interface might include content from a PeopleSoft expense reporting
application. If the manager wants to query an expense item, the
interface could include VOIP and presence capabilities that allow the
manager to click on the employee's name and initiate a VOIP call; in
another example, a manager in charge of a project could set up a wiki
using a template and software wizard and invite members of the project
team to participate.
Container-less SOA
L. Detweiler, JavaWorld Magazine
SOA/ESB techniques do deliver increased modularity, flexibility and
reusability of components, which has been the age-old promise of object-
oriented programming (OOP) and even general software engineering. In
particular, SOA/ESB appears to extend effectively on the hallowed OOP
principle of encapsulation. But it seems all new paradigms come with
a "dark side" that must be effectively recognized and managed to
minimize undesirable consequences. What is the dark side of SOA/ESB?
This article examines it and proposes a powerful technique and "quasi-
architecture" as the solution. The dark side of SOA/ESB is increased
runtime and testing complexity. A complex SOA/ESB architecture can
resemble a circuit wiring diagram, where service calls are the wires
and operations are the components. However, circuits have an inherent
one-way flow of electricity, and SOA can involve two-way communication
(service A calls service B, service B calls service A). If you have
n services, there are n-squared possible interactions between those
services. The general direction of container-less SOA is a packaged
architecture. The code could be developed such that it is one cohesive
application that doesn't use any external systems, e.g., JMS/socket-
based messaging, external database, connection pools, etc.; then a
packaging step can substitute in the components that permit scalability.
With the container-less SOA approach, an added benefit is that
programmer emphasis on developing container-common features, such as
JMS libraries, is decreased. The whole concept of refactoring might be
revisited under the container-less SOA architecture. The SOA
architecture encourages building all the business logic to function
correctly and then, at the very last moment, exploring, deriving, and
delineating the service boundaries, which is quite the opposite of
the current convention of attempting to dictate the service boundaries
before any code is written. Putting business logic into services then
becomes more of a final wrapping step rather than a cumbersome priority
always to keep foremost in mind during development. A container-less
SOA/ESB technique holds significant potential for speedier SOA/ESB
software development. The SOA/ESB approach is a highly enterprise-level
model right now and is somewhat far from utilizing a rapid application
development scenario; however, the container-less approach brings
these paradigms closer together. It uses the leverage of a self-
contained system.
IEEE 802.21 RDF Basic Schema for Media-Independent Information Service
Kenichi Taniuchi (et al, eds), IETF Internet Draft
This document describes the basic schema for IEEE 802.21 Media-
Independent Information Service, an RDF (Resource Description Framework)
schema defined in IEEE 802.21. This document serves as the Specification
required by the IANA to maintain a global registry for storing the RDF
schema. IEEE 802.21 is a standard that specifies 802 media access-
independent mechanisms that optimize handovers between heterogeneous
802 systems and between 802 systems and cellular systems. IEEE 802.21
provides a set of handover-enabling functions withhin the protocol
stacks of the network elements and a new entity created therein called
the MIH Function (MIHF). The MIIS defines information models and
query mechanisms where a query mechanism depends on the information
model which it is based on. There are two types of information models
in the MIIS for representing the same set of pre-defined information
elements in different ways. One information model is based on TLV
(Type-Length- Value) in which information elements are identified by
integer values. The other information model is based on RDF (Resource
Description Framework) in which information elements are identified by
URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). The two information models have
different characteristics in terms of namespace management as well as
query capability. This document is intended for the latter type of
information model. In RDF, an information model is described in the
form of RDF schema To provide extensibility in terms of defining new
information elements in addition to the pre-defined ones, the RDF
schema definition for MIIS consists of two parts; the basic and the
extended schema. An MIH entity is pre-provisioned with the basic
schema for querying standard information elements defined in the 802.21
specification. The basic schema requires a persistent URL for its
definition. An extended schema is used for querying vendor-specific
information elements and it does not require a persistent URL for its
definition. This document describes the IEEE 802.21 basic schema, an
RDF schema used for IEEE 802.21 MIIS. This document serves as the
Specification required by the IANA to maintain a global registry for
storing the RDF schema (RFC 3688).
See also: W3C RDF references
Microsoft to Wikipedia: Just the Facts, Please
Joe Wilcox, Microsoft-Watch.com
Maybe you really do get what you pay for. Since August, Microsoft has
sought to get changed what it believes are inaccuracies contained in
Wikipedia articles about desktop file formats, particularly Open XML.
After months of slow responses from Wikipedia, changes were made,
following word that the company offered to pay Rick Jelliffe to
correct entries. The Talk:Ecma Open XML discussion page catalogs some
of the requests and changes. News stories proliferated over the last
couple days, with many aghast that Microsoft would offer to pay someone
to edit Wikipedia posts. Initially, I shared a similar view, which my
colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols expressed yesterday, about the
pay-for-edit offer. But in the more than 24 hours since, my position
has changed, and I'm backing Microsoft on what was an arguably risky
endeavor. I keep coming back to the same question: What other choice
did Microsoft have? Given Wikipedia's current policies, which would
discourage Microsoft or its representatives from correcting entries,
and slow Wikipedia responsiveness to requests for corrections, the
answer is none — or close to it. Microsoft had the option to publish
a white paper and link back to Wikipedia discussion forums. But,
c'mon, what kind of resolution is that? Microsoft knows that Wikipedia
is a widely used research tool. Even my 12-year-old daughter uses
Wikipedia as a resource for school work, as do her friends. Is it
surprising that Microsoft would want to remove any perceived bias on
Wikipedia? Microsoft's position would be indefensible if the company
approached a biased rather than fairly neutral third party. However,
Jelliffe is considered to be fairly neutral. "We believe that it is
important for Wikipedia to have the most accurate content possible
that reflects the true facts about Open XML," said Microsoft spokeswoman
Catherine Brooker. "Since Wikipedia's editing staff had concerns about
information we were calling out as inaccurate, we thought that they
might be more comfortable if we enlisted the help of someone who could
look at the entries with an outsider's perspective."
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