XML and Web Services In The News - Monday 17 March 2003

Specification Overlap Sets Alarm Bells Ringing
Gavin Clarke, Computer Business Review
The prospect of web services fragmentation appears to have came a little closer, as IBM Corp and Microsoft Corp unveiled proposed XML messaging specifications overlapping with work from Sun Microsystems Inc. The WS-ReliableMessaging and WS-Addressing specifications overlap with WS-Reliability, announced in January 2003.

WSRP an OASIS for Portal Deployment
David Rubinstein, SD Times
An industry specification for the consumption of Web services in portal front ends, as well as to standardize the way in which content providers write Web services for portals, is advancing through the OASIS standards group, with the technical committee finishing up its work sometime this month.

Google Gains Visual Searches. Anacubis Integrates Data Viewer into Google Web APIs Service
Cathleen Moore, InfoWorld
Data-visualization software provider anacubis this week integrated its anacubis Viewer technology with the Google Web APIs service to allow developers to visually explore relationships between Web sites. The Java- and XML-based anacubis Viewer lets users visually navigate and explore online structured data.

BEA's Latest Survival Tack: Integrated Product Stack
John Taschek, eWEEK
BEA's new strategy is in integration. That is, BEA is taking its entire product stack and attempting to ensure that it all works together, can be sold together and is fundamentally on the same development cycle. WebLogic Platform 8.1, for example, expands the integrated development concepts BEA toyed with when it released WebLogic Platform 7.0.

Actional Boosts Web Services Management. Console, Agent Technology Added to Platform.
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Seeking to simplify the management of Web services-based business processes, Actional will unveil policy management software, agent technology, and an upgraded version of its services broker. The product portfolio is intended to minimize the impact of constant changes inherent in dynamic enterprise Web services environments.

BEA Releases Web Services Specifications Supporting Asynchrony, Reliable Messaging, Metadata.
XML Cover Pages
BEA Systems has announced new specifications for asynchrony, reliable messaging, and general message data. WS-Acknowledgement supports reliable message exchange between services by providing for at-least-once and exactly-once SOAP message transfer guarantees. WS-Callback is used to dynamically specify where to send asynchronous responses to a SOAP request. WS-MessageData introduces the MessageData header for standardized metadata management.

NISO Releases Proposed OpenURL Metadata and Linking Standard.
XML Cover Pages
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has released a review draft of "The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services, Part 1: ContextObject and Transport Mechanisms." The OpenURL specification defines a general framework to bundle specific packages of contextual metadata and transport them over the network. Part 2 "Initial Registry Content" details the core properties that can be used in instantiations of the general framework.