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XML and Web Services In The News - 13 June 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML.org Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
Develop Forms Using the Visual XForms Designer
J. Kratky, K. Wells, K. Kelly, IBM developerWorks
In March 2006, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the second
edition of the XForms 1.0 specification. XForms is intended to be
"the next generation of forms for the Web." XForms provides a number of
advantages over existing HTML forms technology. As the Recommendation
itself declares, "By splitting traditional XHTML forms into three parts
-- XForms model, instance data, and user interface -- it separates
presentation from content, allows reuse, gives strong typing -- reducing
the number of round-trips to the server, as well as offering device
independence and a reduced need for scripting." Shortly after the March
release of XForms 1.0, IBM alphaWorks released a new round of free tools
to accelerate the development of XForms documents. Newest in this suite
of tools is the Visual XForms Designer, which lets you construct forms
visually. The Visual XForms Designer integrates with Eclipse, and among
the familiar Eclipse constructs are a perspective, a set of views, and
an editor with a palette-driven design canvas. This article takes you
on a whirlwind tour of the Visual XForms Designer. Visual XForms Designer
enables the major phases of form development: data definition, control
creation, submission creation, and testing.
See also: XML and Forms
Web Services Made Easy with JAX-WS 2.0
John Ferguson Smart, Java.net
JAX-WS (formerly JAX-RPC) is Sun's answer to the question of how to
develop web services easily in Java. JAX-WS 2.0 provides a library of
annotations and a toolkit of Ant tasks and command-line utilities that
hide the complexity of the underlying XML message protocol. This new
release supports different protocols such as SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, and
REST, and uses JAXB 2.0, also new to Java EE 5, for XML data binding.
When writing a JAX-WS 2.0 web service, the developer uses annotations
to define methods either in an interface or directly in an
implementation class (the interface can be automatically generated).
On the client side, the web service client simply creates a proxy object,
and then invokes methods on this proxy. Neither the server nor the
client needs to generate or parse SOAP (or REST) messages; the JAX-WS
2.0 API takes care of these tedious low-level tasks. Using a powerful
combination of Java 5 annotations and Ant-compatible tools to mask
the underlying complexity of the SOAP protocol, JAX-WS 2.0 greatly
simplifies the development of web services and of web-service-based
SOA architectures.
See also: the JAX-WS Project web site
JBoss to Open Systems Management
China Martens, InfoWorld
JBoss Inc. is opening up its Operations Network (ON) agent technology
to developers in a bid to drive standards in open-source systems
management. ON is management software for JBoss Enterprise Middleware
Suite (JEMS) enabling users to inventory, administer, configure, monitor,
automatically update and provision applications based on JEMS. The
middleware player is looking to create "a heterogenous systems
management solution" that can be standardized in the open-source arena.
JBoss already uses its agent technology to manage a variety of operating
systems including Linux, Windows and some versions of Unix as well as
JBoss middleware and Apache Web Server and Apache Tomcat. The vendor
will look to the open-source developer community to create management
agents for other middleware products and for database software. JBoss
also released its Seam 1.0 framework for developing Web 2.0 applications,
which brings together and integrates technologies such as Ajax
(asynchronous JavaScript and XML), JavaServer Faces, Enterprise
JavaBeans 3.0 and business process management. The vendor also said it
was extending its current certification program to include companies
that use JEMS to provide hosted software services.
See also: JBoss Seam
XSLT 2.0, XML Query and XPath 2.0 Candidate Recommendations
Michael Kay et al. (eds), W3C Technical Reports
W3C announced that the XML Query and XSL Working Groups have released
updated Candidate Recommendations for XML Query 1.0, XSLT 2.0, XPath
2.0, and supporting documents. The XQuery use cases are also updated.
The new drafts incorporate comments received in the Candidate
Recommendation review, and move the "xdt:*" types to the XML Schema
"xs" namespace -- a change made in conjunction with the XML Schema
Working Group. XSLT transforms documents into different markup or
formats. Important for databases, search engines and object repositories,
XML Query can perform searches, queries and joins over collections of
documents. Both XSLT 2 and XQuery use XPath expressions and operate on
XPath Data Model instances. Visit the XML home page.
See also: the W3C news item
Step Aside Google Spreadsheets: Bricklin's WikiCalc Has Reinforcements
David Berlind, ZDNet Blog
Dan Bricklin, the co-inventor of the electronic spreadsheet and now the
inventor of WikiCalc, and Ross Mayfield, the CEO of wiki solutions
provider SocialText, have gotten together in a unique partnership that
could be more disruptive to the status quo than most people may realize.
According to the Beta web site: "The wikiCalc program is a web authoring
tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted
prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person
editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data
organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet. It can be easily set up to publish
to basic web server space accessed by FTP and there is no need to set
up server-side programs like CGI. It can, though, run on a server and
be used with nothing more than a browser on the client."
See also: the Beta web site
IM for SAP with Jabber (XMPP)
Piers Harding, Blog
W3C has issued an updated Working Draft for "Language Tags and Locale
Jabber and IM is very much in the ascendancy at the moment, thanks to
Google Talk which uses the very same XMPP protocol for messaging. XMPP
is an XML streaming protocols for instant messaging and presence
developed within the Jabber community. Because the transmission of data
is encapsulated in XML, and must conform to the controlling rules of
XML, coupled with implementation rules for the protocol such as dialback
for server to server communication etc., making XMPP a very secure
messaging platform. Testimony to this is the absence of SPAM, in fact
it could be robustly argued that if the backbone of SMTP was replaced
with XMPP then SPAM would be history. Additionally, XMPP is a recognised
Standard: the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has formalized the
core XML streaming protocols as an approved instant messaging and
presence technology under the name of XMPP, and the XMPP specifications
have been published as RFC 3920 and RFC 3921. Jabber, being the
historical root of XMPP, has a number of server, client and component
implementations surrounding it. [So] what we have here is the ability
to push events between R/3, and "A" another endpoint. By virtue of
transport components, these events can traverse protocols, and can be
integrated with just about any platform you care to think of because of
client programming language support for XMPP (C, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby,
Erlang to name some). To me, this all spells a universal messaging
platform that is open, reliable, secure, standards compliant, that is
ready to be used as a carrier for business data from alerts, to documents,
to workflow events. The Jabber Protocols page describes what processes
and functionality is currently supported, and what things are in the
pipeline. Currently Jabber clients routinely handle URLs, which make
a good starting point for relaying Workflow items (integration points
for BSPs, EP etc.). It also has specifications for RPC style
encapsulation, and reference implementations for SOAP document
transmission. Beyond this, Jabber messaging has the potential for
embedding workflow objects ala Duet, to be interpreted by an extension
to an existing Jabber client.
See also: the XMPP RFC
Introduction to SOA Governance
Bobby Woolf, IBM developerWorks
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a compelling technique for
developing software applications that best align with business models.
However, SOA increases the level of cooperation and coordination
required between business and information technology (IT), as well as
among IT departments and teams. This cooperation and coordination is
provided by SOA governance, which covers the tasks and processes for
specifying and managing how services and SOA applications are supported.
In this article, discover what governance and management are and why
they're important. We'll then review the following important aspects
of SOA governance: Service definition; Service deployment life cycle;
Service versioning; Service migration; Service registries; Service
message model; Service monitoring; Service ownership; Service testing;
Service security. Governance involves establishing responsibilities
and empowering responsible parties, whereas management involves making
sure the governance policies actually occur. Technology can be used
not to set governance, but to perform management. Governance that is
managed during service invocation can be effectively managed by an ESB,
simplifying the responsibilities of both the providers and consumers.
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