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XML and Web Services In The News - 12 April 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML.org Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP
HEADLINES:
XML Processing Model Requirements and Use Cases
Alex Milowski (ed), W3C First Public Working Draft
W3C announced that its XML Processing Model Working Group has released
a First Public Working Draft of the "XML Processing Model Requirements
and Use Cases" document. The draft describes the conceptual model of
XML process interactions, the XML Pipeline Language to describe these
interactions, and the inputs and outputs of the overall process. The
Working Group was chartered to standardize the order, parameters, and
expected results for transformations for a large group of specifications
such as XSLT, XML Schema, XInclude. and XML Canonicalization that
operate on and produce XML documents. The specification is not generally
concerned with the implementations of actual XML processes participating
in the interactions addressed.
See also: the W3C news item
Google Unveils Web-based Calendar Application
Elinor Mills, CNET News.com
Google has unveiled a free Web-based calendar application that is
expected to heat up competition with Yahoo and Microsoft. The beta
version of Google Calendar, which can be accessed without a Gmail
account, enables users to search for and add events from within the
program or through Web sites that use open standards for calendars.
Such sites are invited to add Google Calendar buttons next to events
they list. Users of the new Google application can also access events
from friends' shared calendars and import events from Microsoft
Outlook. Google has also built invitation management into Google
Calendar. Users can create event invitations to be sent to anyone with
an e-mail account. They can also send event reminders via e-mail or
cell phone text message, and keep track of RSVPs from within the
program. People can see their schedules by day, week, month and four-
day views, highlight any period from a monthly calendar for a
customized view and display only certain events at a time on their
calendar view. The application interoperates with other calendaring
applications that use Apple Computer's iCal or the XML standards. In
the coming months, Google Calendar will be able to synchronize with
Outlook and mobile devices. Like it is doing with other applications,
such as Google Maps, the company is opening up the application
programming interface (API) so outside developers can use it to build
third-party programs that will work with Google Calendar data.
See also: Calendar project references
TYPO3 - Version 4.0 Launched
Staff, LinuxElectrons
TYPO3, a popular open source content management syste, has been updated.
Besides new backend features, the frontend has also received a facelift.
Thanks to several modifications to the CSS Styled Content extension,
TYPO3 is now in the position to produce standards compliant XHTML,
laying the foundation for accessible (WAI compatible) websites. The
Indexed Search extension has been thoroughly revised as well and has
increased in both speed and function, making mass indexing of several
TYPO3 sites and its content possible. Enhancements include crawler
improvements, template support and the indexing of OASIS OpenDocument
files.
See also: the SourceForge project
BMC, Fujitsu, IBM, HP Launch CMDB Initiative
Tony Baer, Computer Business Review Online
A group of several systems management vendors are taking tentative
steps toward proposing standards for the repositories that track IT
assets and how their configurations change over time. The companies
are trying to tackle what has long proven one of the most elusive holy
grails in IT service management: how to keep system administrators and
service desk representatives up to date on the assets they are trying
to manage or problems they are trying to solve. Such a repository,
called a Change and Configuration Management Database (CMDB), is called
for by ITIL (IT Infrastructure Libraries), a framework that provides
terminology and a way to organize best practices around IT service
delivery. CMDBs have been among the most elusive holy grails in
optimizing delivery of IT service. The dilemma is that in most companies
if these data are stored at all, chances are they reside in multiple,
vendor-specific repositories that are difficult, if not impossible, to
synchronize. For instance, one system may store desktop and laptop
client images or configurations, while other systems may be devoted to
servers, storage pools or networks. The goal is a draft specification
for exchange of CMDB data in a federated manner supporting the two
interfaces specified by ITIL. Eventually, the group wants to select a
standards organization under which this effort would eventually be
formalized. Potential candidates might include itSMF International
(IT Service Management Foundation), which has been heavily associated
with ITIL adoption. Alternatively, the effort could reside at DMTF
(Distributed Management Task Force), which has previously developed
the CIM (Common Information Management) framework.
See also: the announcement
Document Engineering
Bob DuCharme, (reviewer) of the book by Bob Glushko and Tim McGrath
Bob Glushko and Tim McGrath's new book Document Engineering: Analyzing
and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services
describes "document engineering" as a new discipline. The discipline,
if not the name, will sound familiar to people who work with XML in an
automated publishing context, a web services context, or somewhere in
between. There's a common distinction in the XML world between
"data-oriented" XML and "document-oriented XML" that I prefer to
describe as transaction-oriented XML versus publishing-oriented XML
(see Documents vs. Data, Schemas vs. Schemas). It's all data, and
it's all documents. The status of all well-formed XML as both data
and documents is something that Glushko and McGrath take very seriously,
and they've studied engineering techniques from both the business
transaction and the publishing worlds to help the reader address
issues in both ends of the spectrum and in the many cases in between.
For example, in addition to reviewing the methodology proposed in
Eve Maler and Jeanne El Andaloussi's classic book Developing SGML
DTDs: From Text to Model to Markup, they present the first detailed
approach I've seen to applying classic database normalization
techniques to documents.
See also: the published description
Why Open Standards Matter
Tina Gasperson, NewsForge
"I think open source software is a good thing, but I've never bought
into the religious fundamentalist fervor of a lot of the circles I move
in as an IT reporter. Condemning people for not using Linux instead of
Windows, and the strong-arm tactics of some proprietary software makers
that try to lock people into a certain product, are just two sides of
the same coin. But open standards that make real choices possible? Now,
that's something I can get behind. This week I spent six and a half
hours at Government Day, a sub-conference at LinuxWorld Boston led by
Leon Shiman, the founder of X.org."
Stimulating Open Source Development Using Competitions
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Opinion Blog
In response to the suggestion that there should be a competition with
prize money to stimulate development of faster XML parsers suitable
for high transaction work, Robin Berjon of the W3C Efficient XML
Interchange WG announced a competition for a fast XML parser. His WG
wants to find the fastest XML parser in order to have some benchmark
to see whether the non-XML (but XML infoset carrying and XML API
interfaceable) binary formats being considered deliver enough
improvement to be worthwhile. [Jelliffe:] This is exactly the right
kind of initiative from the W3C. It addresses my hobbyhorse that
current Open Source parsers have not been written for raw speed
(in fact, I see from Perl benchmarks that they get a 30 to 1 performance
difference on different parsers and interfaces) and many have not
benefitted from recent advances in optimizations; it is both sad and
a tribute to James Clark that expat, about the first XML parser, is
still about the fastest Open Source XML parser for some document types).
However, I don't know if it will work. There needs to be money involved."
ICESoft Releases Beta of AJAX Tool for Java Developers
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
ICESoft Technologies has released the beta version of its ICEFaces
Community Edition, an AJAX development tool for Java developers.
Officials at Calgary, Alberta-based ICESoft said ICEFaces Community
Edition simplifies the process of developing and deploying enterprise-
level Asynchronous JavaScript and XML applications. ICEFaces is a
framework and set of components abstracted from client runtime software.
ICEFaces leverages the entire Java Enterprise Edition ecosystem of tools
and execution environments, allowing rich Web application features to
be developed in pure Java, and in a pure thin-client model, the company
said. In addition, ICEFaces does not require the use of applets or
proprietary browser plug-ins. ICEFaces applications are rendered as JSF
(JavaServer Faces) applications; Java developers are completely
sheltered from doing any JavaScript-related development.
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