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XML and Web Services In The News - 28 February 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML.org Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
Sun Improves RFID Software
Nancy Gohring, InfoWorld
Sun Microsystems has introduced a new version of its RFID (radio
frequency identification) software. Sun Java System RFID Software 3.0
is aimed at making it easier for enterprises to deploy and administer
RFID networks; the software is compatible with the Sun Solaris 10
Operating System as well as Linux and Microsoft Windows. Companies
embed RFID chips in products or product packaging to track the movement
of goods through development or across an entire supply chain. The
chips can store more data than other commonly used tracking
technologies and the data can be read from several feet away. Sun's
RFID Software 3.0 has a small footprint so it can be embedded in
handheld devices, which could be used by customers to collect and
deliver real time RFID data. The software has been integrated with SAP
Auto-ID Infrastructure, allowing for data to be passed from Sun-based
RFID devices to the mySAP Business Suite. Sun expects that the
partnership will make it easier for enterprises to quickly integrate
RFID data into their back-end SAP systems. But Sun's RFID Software 3.0
is designed to integrate with virtually any enterprise application; the
software supports data protocols including HTTP, XML (Extensible Markup
Language) and Sockets and includes a variety of application programming
interfaces to make it easier for enterprises to integrate the software
with other applications.
See also: announcement
Business User Perspective on UML, BPMN, and BPMS
Francis Ip, IT Redux
Practitioners within the IT industry have been misusing terms and
concepts consistently to promote their eccentricities. These are either
data-centric or process-centric. For instance, objected-oriented
programming uses class to represent an executable unit of code (through
abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism) with which an
application can create, use, and destroy for a computational purpose. Is
class a data or process in UML? It is both. A class encapsulates data
and methods (a form of information hiding) through proper abstraction of
real world entities and events. Since computers became available
commercially in the 50's, graphical modelling languages proliferated and
underwent several re-incarnations through various symbolic mechanisms.
This article addresses UML, BPMN, and BPMS from a business user
perspective at a cursory level.
See also: BPMI.org web site
Oracle SOA Suite
Lori MacVittie, Network Computing
Oracle has spent several years acquiring technology, and just as long
putting the pieces together into a cohesive offering -- including Collaxa
for BPEL, Oblix for WS-Security and WS-Management, and branded Systinet
BSR 6.0 for its registry/repository. Toss in a rules engine and the
result is SOA Suite, a nearly seamlessly integrated set of tools
designed to enable SOA implementations in the enterprise. The primary
component in SOA Suite is Oracle's BPEL PM 10.1.2. SOA Suite is a J2EE
offering that can be deployed in a number of containers, including IBM's
WebSphere, BEA Systems' WebLogic, JBoss and OracleAS. By default, the
suite installs in an OracleAS container with an embedded OracleLite
meta-data repository. SOA Suite differs from most of the other products
we tested in that all of its instances of a service orchestration are
technically stateless, with session information stored in the repository.
SOA Suite's default XSLT engine is Xalan, with Xerces as its default
XML parser, but both use a pluggable model and can be replaced with
another parser and engine if so desired.
See also: BPEL references
BPMS and Work Manager Integration
Jim Alateras, O'Reilly Developer Weblog
The author discusses a work manager application and his attempt to
integrate it with some of the BPMS systems in particular the Intalio
and ActiveBPEL offerings. Of interest is Intalio's recent acquisition
of FiveSight including the eclipse based BPMN designer, which generates
BPEL code and runs on the PXE server. [As for] a GUI to render work
items and support human interaction with the work manager server:
there are a heap of options these days from Tapestry to Echo, both
support AJAX and both can be used to develop snazzy zero-admin style
applications that run within a browser. "I believe that Echo's support
for different browsers is superior to Tapestry's. As you may imagine
there is a lot of JavaScript behind Echo whereas Tapestry offers
component based GUI development, which can incorporate JavaScript and
AJAX style interaction. The work manager is a generic reusable service,
one of the most fundamental when it comes to developing process
oriented applications (POA)."
Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR)
OMG Draft Adopted Specification
The specification "defines the vocabulary and rules for documenting
the semantics of business vocabulary, business facts, and business rules;
as well as an XMI schema for the interchange of business vocabularies
and business rules among organizations and between software tools. This
specification is interpretable in predicate logic with a small extension
in modal logc. This specification supports linguistic analysis of text
for business vocabulary and business rules, with the linguistic analysis
itself being outside the scope of this specification. This specification
is applicable to the domain of business bocabulary and business rules of
all kinds of business activities of all kinds of organizations. It is
conceptualized optimally for business people rather than automated rules
processing, and is designed to be used for business purposes, independent
of information systems designs. Conformant software (1) correctly
consumes and produces XML documents that conform to the SBVR Logical
Formulation of Semantics XML Schema; (2) correctly consumes and produces
XML documents conveying vocabulary information conforming to the SBVR
Business Vocabulary XML Schema; (3) correctly generates an XML document
conforming to OMG's MOF 2 XML Schema from any XML document that conforms
to the SBVR Logical Formulation of Semantics XML Schema, where production
follows the rules of the Vocabulary-to-MOF/XMI Mapping Rule Set."
Annex M documents "Mappings and Relationships to Other Initiatives."
Related spandards include: BRML; ORM; OWL; RDF; RuleML; SRML; SWRL;
ISO: 1087-1, 704-2000, 10241, & 12620 Terminology; 11179 Metadata Registry;
12620 & 13250-2 Topic Maps; 13211 Prolog; 17115 Health Informatics -
Vocabulary for Terminological System; 24707 Common Logic; 2788 and 5964
Thesaurus; ISO N458 Topic Map Constraint Language.
See also: business rule languages
Software AG Unwraps SOA Product Suite
John Blau, Computerworld
Software AG is rolling out a set of products aimed at helping
enterprises move their IT systems to service-oriented architectures
(SOA). Software AG is calling its SOA suite Crossvision. It offers six
tools, including an application composer that supports the Asynchronous
JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)
standards, a repository for SOA assets and tools for business process
management and service orchestration. SOA services are generally
standards-based, reusable process components that are created by adding
a common interface, or "wrapper," to a program, allowing it to
interoperate with other applications. Typically written in a language
based on XML, the services fulfill requests from back-end systems to
execute an activity, such as an address change or claim submission. The
Service Orchestrator component in Crossvision helps create and combine
services based on the BPEL standard, compose new business services from
existing systems based on content based routing, encrypt and sign
according to XML security specifications, keep logs and images for
nonrepudiation and reporting purposes, and scale and dynamically balance
load across multiple machines.
See also: OASIS WSBPEL TC
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