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XML and Web Services In The News - 10 July 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP
HEADLINES:
W3C Rule Interchange Format Use Cases and Requirements
A. Ginsberg, D. Hirtle, F. McCabe, P. Patranjan (eds), W3C Working Draft
W3C's Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group has published an
updated Working Draft for "RIF Use Cases and Requirements." Synthesized
from nearly fifty use cases, the document specifies use cases and
requirements for a format that allows rules to be translated between
rule languages and thus transferred between rule systems. Use Cases
include: (1) Negotiating eBusiness Contracts Across Rule Platforms;
(2) Negotiating eCommerce Transactions Through Disclosure of Buyer and
Seller Policies and Preferences; (3) Collaborative Policy Development
for Dynamic Spectrum Access; (4) Access to Business Rules of Supply
Chain Partners; (5) Managing Inter-Organizational Business Policies and
Practices; (6) Ruleset Integration for Medical Decision Support; (7)
Interchanging Rule Extensions to OWL; (8) Vocabulary Mapping for Data
Integration; (9) BPEL Orchestration of Rule-Based Web Services; (10)
Publishing Rules for Interlinked Metadata. The Working Group invites
comments through 8-September-2006.
See also: the RIF WG Wiki
BPEL: Service Composition for SOA
Matjaz B. Juric, Java World
Business processes are usually of dynamic nature. Companies have to
improve and modify, act in an agile manner, optimize, and adapt
processes to improve the responsiveness of the whole company. Every
change and improvement in a business process has to reflect in
applications that provide support for them. Although this requirement
may not sound very difficult to fulfill, the real-world situation shows
us a different picture. A business process, as seen by BPEL, is a
collection of coordinated service invocations and related activities
that produce a result, either within a single organization or across
several. For example, a business process for planning business travels
will invoke several services. In an oversimplified scenario, the
business process will require us to specify the employee name,
destination, dates, and other travel details. Then the process will
invoke a Web service to check the employee status. Based on the employee
status, it will select the appropriate travel class. Then it will
invoke Web services of several airline companies to check the airfare
price and buy the one with the lowest price. For the clients, the BPEL
process will expose its functionality in the same way as any other Web
service. The author presents BPEL as one of the most important
cornerstones of SOA. It differs from common programming languages, such
as Java, and is relatively easy to learn and use. Because BPEL has been
designed specifically for definition of business processes, it provides
good support for various specifics of business processes, such as
support for long running transactions, compensation, event management,
correlation, etc. BPEL is well suited for use with the Java EE platform,
and many BPEL servers build on top of it. Java developers, particularly
those who are involved in the development of enterprise applications
and SOA, should therefore take a closer look at BPEL and start using
the benefits it provides.
See also: BPEL references
BPEL: Good for Business
Devesh Sharma and John Deeb, The Grid Today
Describing how a company runs its business usually involves describing
its business processes. Such processes may include managing supply
chains, product lifecycles, customer lifecycles, human resources, and
accounting and finance. These processes often represent a company's
intellectual property, competitive differentiators, and major
innovations. As business conditions change, these processes need to
be changed as well. To be better positioned for success, companies
need to quickly leverage these process changes, which includes changing
the underlying IT systems. The idea that business analysts and developers
will work collaboratively in the future isn't a new one. However, the
advent of standards such as BPEL and BPMN has helped make such a
collaboration happen. The key is to recognize the difference between
the two perspectives -- business and IT -- and treat it as such. For
example, many activities in a business process don't even have
corresponding execution artifacts -- they're purely manual tasks.
Software vendors still have a lot of work to do in order to bridge
this gap, and this calls for much collaboration in the industry. The
approach we've suggested is to build on established standards such as
BPEL and BPMN and introduce a shared metadata concept. This logical
design layer acts as an intermediary between the high-level business
model and the implementation model. The result is a reduced gap
between business and IT, which lets everyone respond more quickly
to changing business requirements and processes.
See also: the OASIS WSBPEL TC
Build Enterprise SOA Ajax Clients with the Dojo Toolkit and JSON-RPC
Roland Barcia, IBM developerWorks
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) is a new way to build rich Web
applications using native browser technology. For developers coding
complex applications that require some type of "alive" user interface,
JavaScript has been the way to go. However, JavaScript is difficult to
code, debug, make portable, and maintain. Using an Ajax toolkit can
help minimize many of the common issues with JavaScript and Ajax.
Good Ajax toolkits provide a set of reusable widgets, a framework for
extending and creating widgets, an event system, JavaScript utilities,
and enhanced asynchronous server invocation support. In this paper,
the author talks about using the Dojo toolkit for building enterprise
SOA clients for Java EE applications. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)-
RPC is used to invoke the server-side Java objects. This paper also
gives a brief introduction to Ajax, Dojo, JSON, and JSON-RPC, as well
as some design principles for designing Ajax applications, and a brief
example you can download and try for yourself.
Final Program Published for Extreme Markup Languages 2006
B. Tommie Usdin, Announcement
Organizers of the Extreme Markup Languages Conference 2006 announced
the publication of the complete program, with paper abstracts. The
event will be held August 7-11, 2006 in Montreal, Canada. According
to the conference summary: "Extreme is an open marketplace of theories
about markup and all the things that they support or that support them:
the difficult cases in publishing, linguistics, transformation,
searching, indexing, storage and retrieval, the things you wish you
could do in XML so much that you're thinking of creating your own
markup system. At Extreme, markup enthusiasts gather each year to
trade in ideas, not to convince management to buy new stuff. Extreme
actively seeks controversy, not just the same old applications."
Titles of presentations (examples): "XMLVS: Using Namespace Documents
for XML Versioning"; "An Introduction to the Burr Metadata Framework";
"The Microformat Definition Language (MDL)"; "XProc: An XML Pipeline
Language."
See also: the Conference Blog
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