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XML and Web Services In The News - 05 July 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
W3C Forms Incubator Group for Geospatial Properties of Web Resources
W3C, Announcement
W3C has announceed the creation of a new Geo Incubator Group (Geo XG),
whose mission is to begin addressing issues of location and
geographical properties of resources for the Web of today and tomorrow.
The group is sponsored by W3C Members the Open Geospatial Consortium,
Oracle Corporation, SRI International, Stanford University, and the
University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute
(USC ISI). W3C's Incubator Activity fosters rapid development, on a
time scale of a year or less, of new Web-related concepts. Target
concepts include innovative ideas for specifications, guidelines, and
applications that are not (or not yet) clear candidates as Web standards
developed through the more thorough process afforded by the W3C
Recommendation Track. Advantages of the Incubator Activity include:
(1) Rapid start of work in an Incubator Group; (2) Lightweight process,
initiated by W3C Members; (3) Rapid finish to produce an XG Report in
under one year; (4) Smooth transition to the W3C Recommendation Track,
if desired and approved; (5) Use of W3C infrastructure -- mailing lists,
communications tools, Web site) and consensus-building within W3C
culture. The Incubator Activity is now being operated on an experimental
basis, and will be reviewed periodically with the W3C Membership. If
it proves to be useful, all or elements of the concepts being tested
could be incorporated into future versions of the W3C Process Document.
See also: the W3C news item
CIPID: Contact Information for the Presence Information Data Format
Henning Schulzrinne (ed), IETF RFC
The IETF RFC Editor has announced a new Request for Comments document
in the online RFC libraries. Edited by Henning Schulzrinne of Columbia
University, this document is now a Proposed Standard Protocol; it is
a product of the SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging
Extensions Working Group of the IETF. The Presence Information Data
Format (PIDF) defines a basic XML format for presenting presence
information for a presentity. The Contact Information for the
Presence Information Data format (CIPID) is an extension that adds
elements to PIDF to provide additional contact information about a
presentity and its contacts, including references to address book entries
and icons. The document describes elements for providing a "business
card", references to the homepage, map, representative sound, display
name, and an icon. This additional presence information can be used
in PIDF documents, together with Rich Presence Information Data format
(RPID) and other PIDF extensions. All elements extend the 'person' or,
less commonly, 'tuple' element in the presence data model. RPID and
CIPID both provide "rich" presence that goes beyond the basic 'open'
and 'closed' status information in PIDF. The presence information
described in these two documents can be supplied independently,
although in practice, both will often appear in the same PIDF document.
CIPID elements describe the more static aspects of someone's presence
information, while RPID focuses on elements that will likely change
throughout the day. Thus, CIPID information can often be statically
configured by the user through the graphical user interface of a
presence client; this is less likely to be sufficient for RPID.
See also: Markup for Names and Addresses
Build an Event-Driven Framework with Apache Geronimo and JMS
J. Jeffrey Hanson, IBM developerWorks
Designing an effective event-driven software system that can respond
to real-time changes and events in a timely manner is a complex task.
An SOA, together with an effective event-driven interaction framework
using Java reflection, can reduce complexities and add flexibility. The
Geronimo platform provides APIs and tools, including a JMS provider,
that you can use to build a powerful event-driven interaction framework.
Unlike sequential or procedural systems -- in which clients must poll
for change requests -- an EDA allows systems and components to respond
dynamically, in real time, as events occur. EDA complements SOA by
introducing long-running processing capabilities. Therefore, businesses
benefit because event consumers receive events as they happen, and
loosely coupled services can be invoked to provide more timely and
accurate data to customers. Moving from linear enterprise programming
to a service-oriented design can only produce benefits that apply to
the SOA model. Refactoring systems to harvest business services should
result in a modular framework of services and components. You can reuse
these components to fit many different applications if the interaction
model of the service infrastructure is agile and extensible. SOA, EDA,
and Apache Geronimo provide the foundation for a powerful and effective
software infrastructure.
Timeline: AJAXy Widget Like Google Maps For Time-Based Information
Hari K. Gottipati, O'Reilly Technical
Simile (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike
Environments), a joint project conducted by w3C/ and MIT Libraries,
has released a visualization tool for time-based information. According
to the project description, its a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for
visualizing time-based events. One example is the JFK Assassination
timeline -- a minute by minute development when John F. Kennedy was
shot on November 22nd, 1963 in Dallas. "SIMILE seeks to enhance
interoperability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies,
metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which
must interoperate are often distributed across individual, community,
and institutional stores. We seek to be able to provide end-user
services by drawing upon the assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies,
and metadata held in such stores. SIMILE will leverage and extend
DSpace, enhancing its support for arbitrary schemata and metadata,
primarily though the application of RDF and semantic web techniques.
The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination
architecture based upon web standards. The dissemination architecture
will provide a mechanism to add useful 'views' to a particular digital
artifact (i.e. asset, schema, or metadata instance), and bind those
views to consuming services."
See also: the SIMILE project web site
Report Blasts Mass. OpenDocument Policy
Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com
Marc Pacheco, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Post Audit and
Oversight, on Tuesday released a report at the Massachusetts State
House, the result of a several months-long inquiry. The report stems
from a decision by the state's Information Technology Division (ITD)
last September to standardize on the OpenDocument format for executive
branch state agencies by January 2007. The move has been criticized by
state politicians, including the state's director of public records.
It also has attracted worldwide attention as a landmark decision among
governments seeking more control over storage of public information.
Microsoft, the dominant supplier of desktop applications, does not
intend to support OpenDocument in Office 2007, the company has said.
It has submitted the document formats to Office 2007 to standards
bodies Ecma International and the International Standards Organization.
In the report, titled "Open Standards, Closed Government: the ITD's
Deliberate Disregard for Public Process," Pacheco contends that the
ITD issued a technical architecture without sufficient input from
interested parties or a realistic cost-benefit analysis. In addition,
he said that the ITD did not have the legal authority to set a standard.
See also: ODF references
Mass. Holding Tight to OpenDocument
Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com
Louis Gutierrez, Massachusetts' chief information officer, said in an
interview with CNET News.com that the Information Technology Division
(ITD) is forging ahead with its project to make OpenDocument the
default document format for executive branch agencies by January next
year. The case has caught worldwide attention as outsiders monitor the
state's success in gaining control over its data and avoiding "vendor
lock-in." On Thursday, state Sen. Marc Pacheco, the chairman of the
Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight, released a report that
blasted the process behind the choice of OpenDocument, calling it
"closed" and controlled by a few individuals. Gutierrez said he
disagreed with the report's characterization of the process that led
up to the state's decision to standardize on OpenDocument, or ODF.
The report's release and the ITD's response to it are the latest twists
in a months-long saga in Massachusetts that has attracted worldwide
attention. Supporters of the state's plan to go with OpenDocument,
rather than a Microsoft format, have hailed it as a landmark move that
will tilt the balance of power to customers and away from vendors.
Critics, meanwhile, have called it a biased decision, unfairly favoring
open-source products to the exclusion of Microsoft. Stephen O'Grady,
an analyst at RedMonk, said that Massachusetts has validated the idea
of standardizing on a non-Microsoft format, giving its effort a
symbolic significance for others.
The Emerging ODF Environment, Part IV: Spotlight on SoftMaker Office 2006
Andrew Updegrove, Blog
In this fourth in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office
productivity suites, I interview Dr. Martin Sommer, SoftMaker Product
Manager, of Germany's SoftMaker Software GmbH. SoftMaker Office includes
word processing and spreadsheet capabilities (with more on the way), runs
on both Windows and Linux, is designed for home users, and is cheap
besides. While SoftMaker Office is not as well known outside of Germany as
KOfiice, another German ODF-compliant software suite, it has a number of
interesting and useful unique features, as does each of the other suites
that I have featured in this series of interviews. Perhaps most interesting
are the facts that SoftMaker Office is availability on mobile devices, and
the that it has been selected by AMD for use in connection with its
ambitious "50x15" plan, which hopes to connect 50% of the world population
to the Internet by 2015. The point of this series of interviews is to
present each competing product in detail illustrates the rich environment
of applications and tools that are evolving around the OpenDocument
Format (ODF) specification developed by OASIS, and now adopted by ISO/IEC.
Previous interviews: Inge Wallin of KOffice, Louis Suarez-Potts and John
McCreesh of OpenOffice.org, and Erwin Tenhumburg of StarOffice. The next
interview in this series will describe IBM's Workplace Managed Client.
My hope is to present a complete set of interviews, including also Google
Writely, Abiword, Novell and Gnumeric. The interview series amply
demonstrates the way in which agreement upon a useful standard -- in this
case ODF -- can rapidly lead to the development of a rich and growing
environment of compliant products, providing customers with variety,
choice, price competition, and proprietary as well as open source product
alternatives.
ISO/IEC 26300 OpenDocument Format Ballot Comment Responses
OASIS OpenDocument TC, Technical Report
This document provides a set of responses to comments from the United
Kingdom, Canada, Hungary, Japan, Egypt, Germany, Israel, and China
on the ODF specification being prepared by ISO. The document "collects
the responses of the OpenDocument Technical Committee (TC) to the
comments that where submitted to the TC as part of the ISO/IEC 26300
balloting process. The TC appreciates all comments it received from the
national bodies, and considers them to be very helpful for improving the
OpenDocument specification. In response to these comments, the TC has
created an updated OpenDocument v1.0 specification where those comments
are resolved that were accepted by the TC, and where the TC agreed that
they could be addressed by an editorial change to the specification.
This updated specification has the name "Open Document Format for
Office Applications (OpenDocument) 1.0 (Second Edition)." At the time
this document is written, it has the status of a 'Committee Draft'. A
public review of the changes is scheduled, and the TC intends to vote
for the specification as a 'committee specification' after the public
review has been successfully conducted..."
See also: OASIS OpenDocument TC
Java EE .Net Security Interoperability
M. Fisher, R. Lai, S. Sharma, L Moroney; JavaWorld
Java and .Net applications can interoperate synchronously or
asynchronously in different architecture tiers. As security is
end-to-end, security for interoperability should not be limited to a
single application component or a specific architecture tier. A Java
client should be able to perform a single sign-on with the .Net
application and similarly for a .Net client with a Java application.
To ensure client-to-server communication is secure, developers can use
HTTPS or SSL/TLS to encrypt the communication channel. In both the Web
and the business tiers, the client should be able to initiate service
requests or exchange business data synchronously or asynchronously
using Web services (with WS-I BSP and WS-Security). This should allow
a servlet, JSP page, or JSF component under the Web tier to interoperate
with a .Net service component under the business tier -- or an ASP.Net
page under the Web tier to interoperate with an EJB object under the
business tier. In the resource tier, a Java servlet or EJB component
can also request access to resources such as business data and database
objects implemented by means of the data access layer using a policy
language such as WS-Policy, XACML, and Web Services Policy Language.
Form-based authentication allows page-level authentication to a Web
application. Shared session data can be stored in a customized shared
session state database or a directory server using existing session
APIs in both Java and .Net platforms. Customized processing logic for
shared authentication and shared session data are often proprietary and
are specific to certain implementations. The use of Web SSO MEX (Single
Sign-on Metadata Exchange) protocols is a proposed standard for Java EE
.Net interoperability to achieve single sign-on and should be
recommended. Shared authentication, shared session data, and single
sign-on using the Web SSO MEX protocol are mechanisms to address broken
authentication and session management. They also rely on strong
authentication mechanisms -- for example, use of digital certificates
and strong user passwords -- and reliable authentication infrastructure,
such as a directory server. For Web services such as asynchronous SOAP
messages, it is critical to use the WS-I Basic Security Profile (BSP)
and WS-Security standards.
Startup Brings Telecom Self-Heal Concept to Computing
Eileen Kennedy, SearchWinIT.com
The big systems management vendors are all building self-healing
platforms, but a Canadian startup is introducing technology that aims
to make systems management just as invisibly dependable as plain old
telephone service. Vendors such as autonomic computer pioneer IBM, as
well as Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft and others are developing
software to proactively manage, diagnose and heal systems management
programs in hopes of controlling rising computer maintenance costs.
IT departments have increasing workloads but have the same number of
workers, or fewer, to get their jobs done. Embotics borrows the
telephony concept of separating management and service functions
instead of the usual computer systems designed with hardware,
operating systems, applications and management agents stacked as one.
The Embotics software supports WS-Management standards for external
communications as well as Microsoft's Operations Manager, IBM's
Tivoli and other server management consoles. WS-Management is a Web-
based, universal software language that lets all sorts of devices
share their data so they can be more easily managed. WS-Management
was developed jointly by about a dozen companies, including Microsoft
and Sun Microsystems, several years ago. Embotics has formed a
partnership with Raritan Inc., a Somerset, N.J., systems management
software vendor, by embedding Embotics software on a Raritan Open
Platform Management Architecture card. It has also joined forces with
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Inc., the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip
maker, by allowing Embotics software to run with AMD's virtualization
chip.
SCO's Case at an End?
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, eWEEK
Since Day One of The SCO Group's lawsuit against IBM on the grounds
that the corporate giant had stolen its Unix intellectual property for
the betterment of Linux, SCO's opponents have shouted that there is
nothing to the company's accusations. Now, more than three years since
the fight began, lawyers think that the court's recent decision to
dismiss many of SCO's claims has shown that SCO's enemies were right
all along. What appears to be the real end of the case came on June 28,
2006. On that day, U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells
dismissed about two-thirds of SCO's claimed 294 examples of IBM
contributing Unix code to Linux. Is there anything of substance left to
SCO's case? The lawyers say no. Michael R. Graham, intellectual property
attorney and partner with Marshall Gerstein & Borun LLP, an IP-specialty
firm based in Chicago, said, "Judge Wells' order striking 198 claims
against IBM brought by SCO is a clear example of SCO being hoisted by
its own petard. Since SCO has since 2003 demanded that IBM produce
specific examples of code, Judge Wells ruled that SCO may be held to
the same standard. Although SCO produced 450,000 lines of code, claiming
in more than 200 claims that IBM had infringed its methods and concepts
in parts of the Linux code, it refused to identify with specificity
what parts of the code contain or embody the allegedly infringing
methods and concepts.
See also: Patents and Open Standards
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