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XML and Web Services In The News - 14 March 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML.org Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
A Conversation with Steve Ross-Talbot
Stephen Sparkes (interviewer), ACM Queue
Steve Ross-Talbot is chair of the W3C Web Services Coordination Group
and co-chair of the Web Services Choreography Working Group. He thinks
pi-calculus can revolutionize BPM, as revealed in this interview.
SRT: "One of the interesting things in the pi-calculus is that if you
have the notion of identity so that you can point to a specific
interaction between any two participants, and then point to the identity
of an onward interaction that may follow, you've now got a causal chain
with the identity token that is needed to establish linkage... [At W3C]
I managed to establish early on a bake-off between Petri net theory and
the pi-calculus within the Choreography Working Group, and clearly the
pi-calculus won the day. It won because when you deal with large,
complex, distributed systems, one of the most common patterns that you
come across is what we call a callback, where I might pass my details
to you, and you might pass it to somebody else, in order for them to
talk back to me. In Petri net theory, you can't change the graph: it's
static. In the pi-calculus, you can... I think the first manifestation
will be in tools for the systems architects to describe unambiguously
the interactions that occur between the fundamental roles or components
or services in a service-oriented architecture. What will happen is
we'll deliver solutions based on the CDL (Choreography Description
Language), which allows systems architects to describe their systems
fully, from an observable perspective, with guarantees about the
introduction or nonintroduction of livelocks, deadlocks, and race
conditions... The first success story was the adoption of CDL by
FpML.org; the second success story that I'm hoping for is that SWIFT
(Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) will
adopt this."
See also: CDL references
Modeling Web Services Choreography: BPMN and New Eclipse Tool pi4soa
Michael Havey, SYS-CON SOA Web Services Journal
Choreography presents a unified global view, depicting all of the
processes and their required interactions. Web Services Choreography
Description Language (WS-CDL) is the leading choreography language,
and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is the dominant process
orchestration language. Though both XML-based languages feature a
similar flow-oriented design style, only BPEL is meant to have an
actual run-time platform: BPEL processes run, and WS-CDL choreographies
are formal specifications documenting rules to guide interprocess
exchange. There are no traffic cops in this laissez faire world, only
traffic laws and law-abiding drivers. This article focuses on two
parts of the choreography cycle: modeling and code refinement. In the
modeling area, there are plenty of good business process tools
supporting UML and BPMN from which to choose, but none of them can
generate WS-CDL output directly. Many can export models in a canonical
form (e.g., XML metamodel interchange, or XMI), but there are no third-
party tools that can generate WS-CDL code from that form. An
open-source version of the proposed code editor, to our delight, is
now available in alpha form. The tool, known as Pi Calculus for
Service-Oriented Architecture (pi4soa, developed by the company
Pi 4 Technologies), is an Eclipse plugin that provides a graphical
editor to compose WS-CDL choreographies and generate from them
compliant BPEL.
See also: the Pi Calculus for SOA SourceForge project
Liberty Alliance Helps Fuel Use of Identity Specs
Jeremy Kirk, ComputerWorld
As the Liberty Alliance Project gathers momentum, industry insiders are
expecting a sharp rise in the use of products and services that use Web
identity-management specifications. On Tuesday, the Liberty Alliance
Project said it expects the number of people and devices using federated
identity specifications it endorses to top 1 billion this year. The 1
billion figure includes people who have created identities using the
Liberty-endorsed specifications, plus devices and Web sites that use the
protocols. In general, the identity-management specifications battle has
subsided, said Graham Titterington, a principal analyst with Ovum Ltd.
in London. "Most of the industry players are now backing Liberty,"
Titterington said. Liberty has supported SAML (Security Assertion Markup
Language) 2.0, a specification ratified in February 2005 that
incorporated elements of several other specifications. The market for
federated identity products is expected to grow because of wide adoption
of SAML 2.0, according to research firm IDC. Identity access management
includes technologies such as Web single sign-on, which allows for the
sharing of log-in information across different Web sites, and advanced
authentication methods such as smart cards and directory services.
See also: SAML references
RDF/A Primer 1.0: Embedding RDF in XHTML
Ben Adida and Mark Birbeck (eds), W3C SWBPD Working Group
W3C announced that its HTML Working Group and Semantic Web Best
Practices and Deployment Working Group jointly have published the
First Public Working Draft of the "RDF/A Primer 1.0." A companion to
the XHTML 2.0 specification, this document introduces syntax for
expressing RDF metadata within XHTML, and explains the use of the XHTML
metainformation modules. RDF/A is a set of attributes used to embed RDF
in XHTML. An important goal of RDF/A is to achieve this RDF embedding
without repeating existing XHTML content when that content is the
metadata. Though RDF/A was initially designed for XHTML2, one should
be able to use RDF/A with other XML dialects, e.g. XHTML1, SVG, given
proper schema additions.
See also: XHTML 2.0 references
Adobe Builds Bridge to Ajax
Darryl K. Taft, eWeek
Adobe Systems released two new open-source libraries March 8 to help
developers bridge Adobe Flash and Flex technology with the hot
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML style of development. The two new open-
source libraries -- the Flex-AJAX Bridge and the AJAX Client for Flex
Data Services -- will enable developers to easily add the capabilities
of the Flash Player and the Flex framework to AJAX applications. And
developers also can add AJAX functionality into RIAs built with Flex.
[Adobe's] Whatcott said the Adobe platform supports things that AJAX
does not support, such as programmable audio, video, vector graphics,
synchronous publish/subscribe data connectivity, offline data storage
and cross-domain data access. The Flex-AJAX Bridge enables developers
to call Flash Player Graphics APIs and to create Flex objects and other
activities. In essence, the bridge enables things such as passing data
from an AJAX data grid to a Flex bar chart or passing data to an AJAX
widget from a Flex application. The AJAX Client for Flex Data Services,
which is expected to be available later this year, lets AJAX
applications connect to Flex Data Services 2.0 and support publish/
subscribe messaging and other data services. Paul Colton, founder of
Xamlon and also of a startup called Aptana and creator of AFLAX
(Asynchronous Flash and XML), a development methodology that combines
AJAX and Flash to create more dynamic Web-based applications, said
the open-source aspect of the new Adobe libraries is significant: "Flash
is a very compelling technology, but requiring ActionScript and
specialized tooling for building applications is a huge factor against
Flash/Flex in the new world of AJAX. AFLAX enables developers to use
only JavaScript on the client and fully utilize the Flash platform
right alongside their other JavaScript code."
Launch of XBRL Service by HM Revenue and Customs Heralds Broader Use of New Electronic Business Language in the UK
Staff, Government Technology
The launch of a service for company tax filings in Extensible Business
Reporting Language (XBRL) by HM Revenue and Customs is an important
step towards general regulatory filing of financial data in this new
electronic language, the UK arm of the international XBRL consortium
said yesterday. HMRC is also releasing a Technical Pack for software
developers and will provide assistance as they enhance their products
to use XBRL. HMRC's announcement that its Corporation Tax Online
service can now accept tax computations in XBRL format follows the
start of filing a few weeks ago of accounts in XBRL to Companies House.
The Companies House system currently covers audit exempt accounts, but
both it and HMRC are looking to expand the scope of accounts filed in
XBRL in due course. Regulators in the US are also making progress with
XBRL projects. The use of XBRL for regulatory bank reporting in the US
has achieved major success, according to the Federal Financial
Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC). The FFIEC said its XBRL-based
solution, which went live in October and receives reports from some
8,300 banks, had achieved measurable benefits, with an increase from
66% to 95% in data cleanliness, 70% to 100% in accuracy, weeks to hours
in timeliness and a 15% rise in the productivity of analysts.
See also: XBRL-UK
Opera Basks in Mini Browser Market Push
Matt Hines, eWEEK
Opera Software is celebrating a pair of wins after signing on two
European carrier partners to help promote its mobile browsers. News of
the deals drove shares of the company's stock up by 20 percent to an
all-time high on its native Norwegian exchange. The more significant of
the two partnerships announced by Opera was established in Germany with
T-Mobile, which said it would begin installing the company's Mini
browser for feature phones as the default browser on roughly 20 of its
midtier devices, including handsets made by Motorola, Nokia and Sony
Ericsson. T-Mobile, which has its U.S. headquarters in Bellevue, Wash.,
is already using Opera Mobile, the company's browser for smart phones,
in some of its high-end devices, some 400,000 of which it has shipped
to users. Opera's second deal was with Debitel, another wireless provider,
based in Stuttgart, Germany, which counts some 10 million subscribers
across Europe. These new partnerships are in addition to Opera's
longstanding deal with France Telecom Orange, and its list of
relationships with device makers including Kyocera, Motorola and Nokia.
[Analyst Brad] Akyuz said that Opera Mini does deliver a compelling
enough proposition to attract people to use the mobile Web once they
have tried the browser out, which he said should ultimately give the
company a chance until something better comes along. Michael Gartenberg,
an analyst with New York-based Jupiter Research, said most people didn't
expect Opera to have as much success as it already has achieved in
bringing its mobile browsers to users.
Complex Data Transformation
Joseph Schwartz, Line 56
Many integration projects get stalled, or even derailed, when companies
run smack into what we call "complex" data. Transforming unstructured
data or data of a highly complex structure, such as in the growing number
of XML-based messaging standards, is beyond the capability of common
integration tools. This limitation forces organizations to manually code
and manage hundreds of interfaces in order to make full use of their
complex data -- an error-prone practice that greatly increases the cost
of what's known as data transformation, already the highest-cost element
of most integration initiatives. In this article the author looks at how
to address the problem. Complex data has long represented one of the
largest obstacles to effective business integration. Moving forward, a
standardized complex data transformation capability will play a key role
in making the full promise of business integration both practical and
cost-effective to achieve. It's time for companies to get smart about
new strategies and technologies for transforming complex data into
standardized, useful information -- and bringing it into a highly
efficient development and deployment environment to power the real-time
enterprise.
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