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XML and Web Services In The News - 06 April 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML.org Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP
HEADLINES:
Sun Expands NetBeans, Offers Eclipse GUI
Vance McCarthy, Integration Developer News
Sun Microsystems continues to push capabilities for its NetBeans IDE,
expanding web services support, and adding support for C, C++ and even
Mac devs. Sun is even making NetBeans GUI technology available to Eclipse.
Genuitec, providers of the MyEclipse distribution of the Eclipse IDE,
has released a preview of an implementation of the NetBeans GUI Builder
for Eclipse. The Matisse4MyEclipse GUI Builder plug-in is based on
NetBeans' Project Matisse technology, and enables the easy creation of
Java Swing rich-client applications within the MyEclipse environment.
Based on the GUI Builder feature recently released in NetBeans 5.0,
Matisse4MyEclipse provides users with the power and usability that has
been creating excitement in the Java development community and
driving momentum for the NetBeans IDE for the past year. The MyEclipse
Enterprise Workbench IDE also extends the Eclipse platform to support
UML, web/AJAX, EJB/Spring/Hibernate, database, and rich client platform
development for the full application life-cycle. From Dan Roberts,
Sun's director of developer tools marketing: "We have a long track
record of standards-based development, and we have always looked at
healthy competition among Open communities as a way to provide greater
advantages for all communities. So, even now with commercial IDEs under
pressure, there is a sense that competition among 'open communities
may actually be better for devs. And that's because as they compete on
features, the open communities may be more able to adopt ideas and
approaches from the other in quicker and more cost-effective ways --
compared to the competition between commercial locked-down platforms,
where most of the technologies were proprietary."
SPARQL Specifications Become W3C Candidate Recommendations
W3C RDF Data Access Working Group, CR Specification Releases
W3C has announced the advancement of the SPARQL specifications to the
level of Candidate Recommendations. This April 06, 2006 draft, along
with the other working drafts for SPARQL has been widely reviewed and
satisfies the requirements documented in RDF Data Access Use Cases and
Requirements. W3C publishes a Candidate Recommendation to gather
implementation experience; this specification will remain a Candidate
Recommendation until at least 6 June 2006. With SPARQL (pronounced
"sparkle"), developers and end users can write and consume search
results across a wide range of information such as personal data, social
networks and metadata about digital artifacts like music and images.
SPARQL Query Language for RDF specifies syntax for authoring, matching
and testing. SPARQL Protocol for RDF describes remote data access and
transmission of queries from clients to processors. The SPARQL Query
Results XML Format is provided for search results.
See also: SPARQL Query Results XML
XACML Policy Model and Unique Features of XACML
Hal Lockhart and Anne Anderson, OASIS TC List Posting
This posting on the 'XACML Policy Model' was extracted from the
Discussion List of the OASIS eXtensible Access Control Markup Language
(XACML) Technical Committee, and provides commentary from Hal Lockhart
(BEA Systems) and Anne Anderson (Sun Microsystems), both key
contributors to the OASIS Standard. Lockhart: "XACML is request
centric. A request of some sort triggers the policy evaluation cycle.
The policies in force are potentially applied to any information
relating to that request. The fundamental issue is: should access be
allowed? XACML allows other actions to be specified (Obligations),
but the focus if its design is about getting that yes or no answer.
Consistent with that, XACML policies operate directly on that
information. XACML does not introduce any synthetic concepts to define
access policies. Many access control systems invent new concepts which
are then referenced by policy. For example, in many environments the
concept of a Privilege is used as shorthand for one or more Actions on
one or more Resources. The Java authorization model takes this one step
further by using a Role as a synonym for some set of Privileges. The
main advantage of the XACML approach is that the policy is 'all in one
place.' All the machinery is in the Policies and Policy Sets. It is
possible that if the chosen abstractions match the problem space well
and the policies are not too complex, the synthetic approach might be
easier to use than XACML. But XACML's goal is to be a universal language
and enable the use of very complex policies. I also believe XACML is
superior for policy maintenance, where the administrator may no longer
remember exactly how the policies were set up or it may have been done
by someone else."
See also: OASIS XACML TC
AJAX for Mobile Devices Will Be the Hallmark of "Mobile Web 2.0" in 2006
Ajit Jaokar, AjaxWorld Magazine
"Recently, Opera announced the availability of AJAX on mobile devices
through their browser. Considering the popularity of Opera in the browser
market (especially in the mobile browser market), this announcement is
indeed very significant. Having been involved in creating mobile
services for a few years now, I believe AJAX will replace both Java ME
and XHTML as the platform of choice for developing mobile applications.
Mobile applications are primarily consumer focused. They need critical
mass. Currently, the market is fragmented and the current commercial
model is broken. AJAX offers a potentially better solution in comparison
to the incumbents (Java ME and XHTML) due to a combination of fewer
potential choke points because of its distribution mechanism. The
economic models do not favor Java ME and AJAX offers a superior user
experience to XHTML. It has the support of the developer community."
UK Council Details StarOffice Savings and Migration Process
Staff, Computer Business Review Online
Bristol City Council in the UK has detailed how it expects to make 60%
office software savings by moving to Sun Microsystems Inc's StarOffice
software, having documented the whole process to pass on to other local
authorities. As part of the UK government-backed Open Source Academy,
Bristol City Council has produced a number of documents used in the
process of moving to StarOffice, including guidance on building a
business case for moving to StarOffice or OpenOffice.org, a feature
comparison of Microsoft Office, StarOffice, and OpenOffice.org, and a
deployment and migration pack. Gavin Beckett, Bristol City Council's
IT strategy manager: "Our biggest challenge was encouraging staff to be
open-minded about anything that wasn't MS Office. Microsoft has become
so dominant and ubiquitous that the default assumption for many people
is that everything else is inferior and that the only way to accomplish
work is to do it in the exact way that an MS Office product does it...
Ultimately, although Microsoft were able to show us the best way to
procure licenses at the lowest cost under the nationally agreed OGC
(Office of Government Commerce) terms, they simply did not respond to
our key point -- that each MS Office license was 12 times more expensive
than the equivalent StarOffice license for the public sector.
Docvert 2.1 Released
Matthew Cruickshank, Holloway
Docvert builds upon the work of several word processors such as
OpenOffice.org, Abiword, and soon KOffice. "This web service software
takes multiple word processor files (typically .doc) and converts them
to Oasis OpenDocument. Web Service receives .doc file and converts it
to a Oasis OpenDocument 1.0 which can then be converted to HTML, RSS,
or any XML format. The resulting OpenDocument XML is then optionally
converted to HTML or any XML. This is done with XML Pipelines, an
approach that supports XSLT, breaking up content over headings or
sections, and saving those results to multiple files (e.g.,
chapter1.html, chapter2.html). The result is returned in a .zip file.
Docvert is easy to integrate as it uses a simple REST-style interface,
and it's released under the LGPL so although it's open source there's
no legal problems developing proprietary software ontop of it. The XML
produced is easier to understand and more structured than the WordML
or .DOC formats..."
Agassi: MySQL to Support SAP This Year
Elizabeth Montalbano, InfoWorld
Products and technology group president Shai Agassi said Thursday he
expects MySQL to be certified to run SAP applications by the end of the
year. On the heels of its venture capital (VC) investment in MySQL AB,
SAP is readying its enterprise software to run on the Swedish company's
open-source database. Agassi responded to criticism that SAP is less
friendly toward open source as a development model as some competitors
are with a reminder that SAP "shipped our applications into the market
with our source open to people for modification for ages." That move
brought mixed results, he said. "Sometimes it was great for the
customers, sometimes it wasn't great for the customers," Agassi said.
It was from this experience that SAP came up with its strategy to
re-architect its applications on a service-oriented architecture, which
it currently is in the process of doing. In this way, the company can
keep its back-end application code intact, while giving customers a
variety of options for integrating their business processes with SAP
applications through open interfaces to them, Agassi said. "We're
finding a demarcation -- which areas should they touch and which areas
they shouldn't," he said. "The service interface is the line under
which you should not come in and alter the code."
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