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XML and Web Services In The News - 27 March 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML.org Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
Atom as a Case Study
Tim Bray, ongoing Blog
Right now, a general-purpose feed reader has to be able to handle three
flavors of RSS and Atom 1.0. On the other hand, if you're generating
feeds, all you really need to support are RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0, and
within a year, more or less all the software will read Atom 1.0 and
that'll start to look really attractive for people who only want to
generate one flavor... The Atom Publishing Protocol, which everyone will
probably call 'APP', is a bigger deal than the data format. The reason
is simple: RSS 2.0 works well enough to get work done and interoperate
pretty well. MetaWeblog basically doesn't, and there's a huge place
in the ecosystem for a portable API. If 'Web 2.0' means anything, it
means the Writeable Web, and right now writing requires special tools
and most of them aren't very good. You should be able to write the web
from your emailer and outliner and browser and camera and spreadsheet
and phone, and we need the APP to make that happen. Since APP wants you
to publish by posting Atom data there'll be a lot of Atom data; the
protocol will drag the data format behind it... The IETF Process Was
a Good Idea: If people get along, you don't need process and rules and
so on; but people don't get along; especially around syndication. The
IETF's virtue, shared by most sane standards organizations, is that it
recognizes that fact and has a process where you can deal with it and
get work done and still be reasonably open and inclusive... Atom is
arguably the canonical example of the place where a formal standards
org is appropriate: there's a substantial body of prior art, we kind
of know what works and what doesn't, and the culture is broken enough
that informal processes aren't gonna get the job done.
See also: Atom references
Government Gets Together on Geospatial Architecture
Sam Bacharach, Directions Magazine
In this article the author looks at a US federal government initiative
that more or less ensures that such capabilities will, in a reasonably
short time, become widely available to people working in federal, state
and local government agencies, and to US citizens. To ensure that the
FEA would optimally meet the cross-cutting geospatial service needs of
all the agencies, the Federal Geographic Data Committee and the Federal
CIO Architecture and Infrastructure Committee (AIC) worked together with
others in a group called the "FEA Geospatial Community of Practice" last
year to create Version 1.1 of the Geospatial Profile for the FEA. That
profile is also known as the Geospatial Enterprise Architecture (GEA).
The GEA Version 1.1 is now in active use, providing guidance to agency
architects and CIOs to help them identify and promote consistent
geospatial patterns in their organizational designs. Detailed
information about the process and the documents in work are available.
A number of OGC experts have also been active in the Geospatial
Community of Practice, providing insight into the adopted OpenGIS
Specifications that comprise the OGC Web Services (OWS) suite of
interoperability standards and also the proposed standards that are
under development inside OGC.
See also: Open Geospatial Consortium
RIF Use Cases and Requirements
Allen Ginsberg and David Hirtle,, W3C Working Draft
W3C has announced the publication of a First Public Working Draft for
"RIF Use Cases and Requirements", produced by members of the Rule
Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group. Following a successful
Workshop on Rule Languages for Interoperability in April 2005, the
RIF Working Group was chartered to produce a core rule language plus
extensions which together allow rules to be translated between rule
languages and thus transferred between rule systems. The new document
on "RIF Use Cases and Requirements" synthesizes the nearly fifty use
cases documenting the need for a RIF as originally submitted. These
were grouped into eight general categories and then synthesized as
much as possible. Guided by that synthesis, the document provides
scenarios that motivate the need and explain the benefits of a RIF.
They are also intended to provide an ongoing reference point for the
working group in its goal of providing a precise set of requirements
for a RIF. Rule-languages and rule-based systems have played seminal
roles in the history of computer science and the evolution of
information technology. From expert systems to deductive databases,
the theory and practice of automating inference based on symbolic
representations has had a rich history and continues to be a key
technology driver. Due to the innovations made possible by the Internet,
the World Wide Web, and, most recently, the Semantic Web, there is now
even greater opportunity for growth in this sector. While some of these
opportunities may require advances in research, others can be addressed
by enabling exisiting rule-based technologies to interoperate according
to standards-based methodologies and processes.
See also: RIF WG web site
Open Source Eclipse/SWT XForms Engine Released
Stefane Fermigier, Eclipse Zone
Nuxeo, a french open source ISV specialised in Enterprise Content
Management, has just published the code for an XForms engine for SWT
and Eclipse. This engine will be used in the Apogee project recently
submitted as a proposal to the Eclipse Foundation. Apogee aims at
building a framework to create ECM-oriented desktop applications,
independent from vendor or technologies. This framework could be used to
create applications that will be integrated with Documentum, Interwoven,
Nuxeo CPS or any ECM platform. The Nuxeo XForms engine allows users to
generate Eclipse/SWT forms from a XForms document, and dynamically
validate inputs against an XML Schema without generating an XML
document. Developers can introspect and test their XForms document
(through a dedicated editor).
See also: XML and Forms
Sonic Upgrades ESB, Touts SOA Benefits
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Sonic Software has announced upgrades for its enterprise service buses
(ESB), with the company touting what it calls the industry's only third-
generation ESB. Sonic ESB 7.0 provides an implementation of advanced
Web services standards for secure and reliable communication between
services suitable for mission-critical deployments: WS-ReliableMessaging,
WS-Addressing, WS-Security and WS-Policy. Often credited for inventing
the term ESB, Sonic views an ESB as providing on-ramping of services in
an SOA. "The main purpose of the ESB is to really allow you to scale up
SOAs to mission-critical usage," Dan Foody, Sonic CTO, said. Sonic ESB
7.0 is the company's third generation of product. Sonic ESB 7.0
improvements focus on graphical tools in the Sonic Workbench, which
provides modeling, configuring, testing and deploying of composite
applications and business processes on the ESB. The new workbench
extends business process modeling to business analysts; it previously
was geared to developers only.
See also: the PR
Jabber XCP 5.0
Michael J. DeMaria, Network Computing
Implementing a groupware-based IM product like IBM's Lotus Sametime can
be expensive and difficult if you're not already using Lotus Notes.
Jabber XCP 5.0 offers an alternative -- it's not expensive compared with
other non-groupware-based IM servers and because it uses an open
standard for IM communication you aren't locked in to a single vendor
solution. Jabber uses a standardized IM protocol, XMPP, so I was able to
connect my Apple iChat client to the test server. XCP also supports
sending messages to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) users, but federating
between a Jabber server and AIM requires sending some information to AOL
and waiting a few days. Being able to use third-party XMPP-based clients
is a bonus in a field where most vendors support only their own clients.
See also: Jabber Protocol references
Conference Report: DITA 2006
Norm Walsh, Blog from the DITA Conference
I only saw a few hours of the DITA conference, but I think it was a
good show. I wish I'd seen more. I remain skeptical about some aspects
of the DITA vision, but that's not really important. Reasonable people
can disagree about the details. The DITA and DocBook approaches differ
somewhat, and there are a lot of differences down in the details, but
I doubt that there's any significant documentation problem that you
could solve with DITA that you couldn't also solve with DocBook, and
vice-versa. So the question of which schema to use isn't a question
about what one can do and the other can't. It's about design patterns,
the richness of the vocabulary, the maturity and capability of tools,
familiarity, comfort, and other tangible and intangible things. For that
reason I think it's much more useful and interesting to look at the
things DocBook and DITA offer, what they have in common, where they
really differ, and what they can learn from each other. Going forward:
(1) DITA development may be informed by DocBook's historical stability
and design patterns; (2) DocBook development may be informed by DITA's
innovations and design patterns; (3) Some documents are topic oriented
and some aren't; (4) Transformation may not be the only road to
cooperation; (5) Cooperation is worth the effort.
See also: DITA references
XML in Firefox 1.5, Part 2: Basic XML Processing
Uche Ogbuji, IBM developerWorks
In Part 1 of the series, the author provided an overview of XML features
in Firefox 1.5. Firefox 1.5, comes with many features for XML developers,
including XML parsing, XHTML, CSS, XSLT, SVG, XML Events in JavaScript,
and XForms. This second article in the series focuses on basic XML
processing: Firefox supports XML parsing, Cascading Stylesheets (CSS),
and XSLT stylesheets. The most basic thing you can do with Firefox and
XML is to load an XML file in an unknown vocabulary with no associated
stylesheet. In one view, it simply shows a logical layout of the parts
of the document Firefox cares about; use "View Source" to see the native
XML code. XML is just a base format with which you can build more
specific formats, and Firefox uses special processing and rendering for
prominent XML formats it happens to support. The primary means used by
for Firefox to determine whether a browsed resource is XML, and if so
whether it's some special form of XML, is the internet media type,
commonly known as the MIME type; a Web server sends MIME type
information for every resource delivered to the browser. Some Firefox
extensions allow Firefox to recognize additional media types. You can
also add an application handler for some XML format. For example, if
you want to handle VoiceXML with a voice browser, you register that
application with the MIME type application/voicexml+xml. The easiest
way to get Firefox to render arbitrary XML in a non-generic way is to
use a stylesheet. Firefox supports cascading stylesheets and XSLT.
See also: Part 1
Microsoft Joins Group Key to ODF Standards Adoption
Elizabeth Montalbano, InfoWorld
In a move some think has the potential to stall the adoption of
OpenDocument Format (ODF) as an international standard, Microsoft has
joined a group that takes part in the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) voting process to standardize ODF. Microsoft has
joined the V1 Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
group within the International Committee for Information Technology
Standards (INCITS), a Washington-based organization. INCITS is
involved in recommending what technologies should become ISO standards,
and the V1 Text Processing group in particular deals with office
document formats. Pamela Jones, author of the popular Groklaw blog,
called attention to Microsoft's participation in the INCITS committee
on her blog last week. She said Microsoft's presence on the committee
could stall the standardization process for ODF, at least until Open
XML makes it through the same ISO process. In a statement attributed to
Jason Matusow, Microsoft's director of standards affairs, the company
said its representative to the INCITS committee, Jim Thatcher, will
have no impact on the ODF standardization voting process. Instead, he
joined the group to put himself in good standing to promote Open XML as
that standard moves through the ISO process.
See also: ODF references
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