XML and Web Services In The News - 26 May 2004

Thinking XML: Use the Atom Format for Syndicating News and More
Uche Ogbuji, IBM developerWorks
The Web has always included sites that present series of articles, events, and other postings which are meant to be shared and cross- referenced. With large parts of the Web becoming conversational communities, many in these communities have come together to work on an XML-based standard for such interchange and cross-reference. Atom is the product of this effort -- a format and API for exchanging Web metadata. Originally an RSS replacement, Atom is now spinning into the nucleus of the conversational Web. Atom is remarkable for many reasons, but especially in how it has remained simple despite being the product of one of the largest committees that ever assembled itself for a community specification. Atom comprises a Syndication Format Specification, which is the XML format for representing information about a Web resource, and an API Specification, which is a set of conventions based on HTTP for retrieving and modifying information in Web resources. Both specifications are written as Internet Drafts with the goal of standardization as RFCs, although currently only the API spec has been formally submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). In addition to the XML syntax, Atom is also being developed in RDF form using Web Ontology Language (OWL). Several Atom implementations are already available for experimentation and the Atom community is quite open, in case you're inspired to contribute to the effort.
See also: the IETF WG Proposal

Company Looks to Capitalize on Free XML Tool
David Becker, ZDNet News
While computing giants such as Microsoft and Adobe Systems look to claim a chunk of the booming Extensible Markup Language market, a small Austrian software maker has its own strategy -- free software for the masses. Vienna-based Altova makes an array of developer tools for working with XML, the fast-spreading standard for exchanging data between disparate computing systems. But the company also gives away a full-fledged authoring application that enables nondevelopers to create XML documents. Altova's Authentic software -- which has been downloaded by more than 500,000 users -- dresses up raw XML with a slick interface that makes unwieldy chunks of code look like a spreadsheet or a word- processing document. Altova isn't looking to knock Microsoft Office out of the market; the bare-bones word-processing capabilities in Authentic were only recently expanded to include a spell-checker. But Authentic does provide an alternative for companies that want to experiment with the benefits of XML without investing in the latest productivity software; Authentic has proven particularly useful for producing simple interactive forms.
See also: the Authentic description

UML Goes Native in Sun's Java Studio
Michael Singer, InternetNews.com
Sun Microsystems is adding a native version of Unified Modeling Language (UML) to its enterprise Java developer platform. A licensing and development deal between the Santa Clara, Calif.-based network computer maker and Embarcadero Technologies will add Describe UML version 6.1 to its next release of Java Studio Enterprise platform. UML is a general -purpose notational language for specifying and visualizing complex software, especially large, object-oriented projects. UML builds on previous notational methods such as Booch, OMT, and OOSE. The Describe part of UML gives developers a shorter learning curve; in addition, programming code and the UML models are always synchronized, which helps to speed up the developer's job by enabling the navigation and maintenance of code directly from the diagram.
See also: the announcement

WWW 2004 and the Semantic Web
Elliotte Rusty Harold, Cafe con Leche Blog
Like many successful technologies before it (XML, HTML, Java, Linux), XForms doesn't really let you do anything you can't do today. It is not radically new. It does not require reorganizing the way one runs a business or develops software. Unlike the semantic web, it does not require learning completely new and unfamiliar areas of technology such as ontologies and inference systems. What XForms does do is give developers the tools to write a lot of the applications they're already writing today much more quickly, cleanly, and robustly. XForms are going to enable really new, server-deployed applications running inside browsers that just can't be handled in HTML. For instance, one XForm demoed at the WWW 2004 conference essentially embedded a spreadsheet inside an HTML page. This wasn't done with ActiveX code like in IE; it was all written with declarative XForms.
See also: XML and Forms

XQuery API for Java (XQJ) 1.0 Specification
Jan-Eike Michels (ed), Early Draft Review JSR
XQuery 1.0 is a query language being developed by the W3C XML Query Language Work Group. The XQuery API for Java (XQJ) specification is to define a set of interfaces and classes that enable an application to submit XQuery queries to an XML data source and process the results of these queries. The design of the API will also take into account precedents established by other JSRs, notably JDBC and JAXP. The specification relates to XQuery in the same way that JDBC relates to SQL. The specification may also provide the ability to submit XPath 2.0 expressions to an XML data source, though XPath 2.0 is not a proper subset of XQuery 1.0 in the latest public working drafts. XQJ may allow an application to specify queries using XQueryX, the XML representation of XQuery queries. According to the Early Draft: "In a typical scenario, the basic building blocks of an XQJ application are connecting to an XQuery implementation, creating an expression (or prepared expression) from the connection, possibly binding values for external variables used in an expression (or prepared expression), executing the expression (or prepared expression), processing the result, optionally repeating [the preceding steps] as needed, and closing the connection, thereby freeing all resources allocated for this connection."
See also: XML and Query Languages