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XML and Web Services In The News - 20 July 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Sun Microsystems
HEADLINES:
Common Locale Data Repository Version 1.4
Unicode Consortium, Announcement
The Unicode Consortium has announced today the release of a new version
of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR 1.4), providing
key building blocks for software to support the world's languages.
CLDR is by far the largest and most extensive standard repository of
locale data. This data is used by a wide spectrum of companies for
their software internationalization and localization: adapting
software to the conventions of different languages for such common
software tasks as formatting of dates, times, time zones, numbers,
and currency values; sorting text; choosing languages or countries by
name; and many others. This release of CLDR contains data for 121
languages and 142 territories — 360 locales in all. Version 1.4 of
the repository contains over 25% more locale data than the previous
release, with over 17,000 new or modified data items entered by over
100 different contributors. CLDR 1.4 uses the XML format provided by
the newest version of the Locale Data Markup Language (LDML 1.4).
LDML is a format used not only for CLDR, but also for general
interchange of locale data, such as in Microsoft's .NET. Some of the
major features of LDML 1.4 used in the repository include new XML
structures supporting customizable detection of words, lines, and
sentences (segmentation), transliteration between different alphabets,
and full compatibility with the recently approved internet standards
for language tags. It also supports enhanced formats for dates and
times, and adds new guidelines for date, time, and number parsing.
See also: the earlier news item
The Semantic Web Revisited
Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, Tim Berners-Lee; IEEE Intelligent Systems
The next wave of data ubiquity will present us with substantial
research challenges. How do we effectively query huge numbers of
decentralized information repositories of varying scales? How do we
align and map between ontologies? How do we construct a Semantic Web
browser that effectively visualizes and navigates the huge connected
RDF graph? How do we establish trust and provenance of the content?
The critical factors that led to the Web's success will also be
important to the success of our Semantic Web enterprise. Some of these
factors are social; others have their origin in elementary and
fundamental design decisions about the Web's architectural principles.
For example, the URL concept embodied the principle that every Web
address is equal and all content one jump away. Other critical features
included the ability to let links fail (the 404 error). A great deal
of the success relates to what we might call the ladder of authority.
This is the sequence of specifications (URI, HTTP, RDF, ontology, and
so on) and registers (URI scheme, MIME Internet content type, etc),
which provide a means for a construct such as an ontology to derive
meaning from a URI. Another example is the construction of a standards
body that's been able to promote, develop, and deploy open standards.
LDAP Schema for eXtensible Resource Identifier (XRI)
Marty Schleiff, IETF Internet Draft
This document specifies particular LDAP schema objects pertinent to
XRI. It is intended as an Internet-Draft to be referenced in a
subsequent request for assignment of OID numbers for each schema
object, according to processes described in RFC 4520. The OASIS XRI
Technical Committee develops specifications for representation of
various types of resource identifiers within a standard framework
called XRI (eXtensible Resource Identifier). XRIs identify resources
independent of any specific network location, domain, application,
or protocol. Conventions for representing an object's XRI(s) in
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and X.500 directory
services will simplify deployment of XRI-aware directory client
applications and interoperability among such applications. The
document defines an Object Class and several Attribute Types for
conventional representation of XRIs in directory services.
See also: the OASIS XRI TC
Jitterbit Streamlines Data Migrations
Peter Wayner, InfoWorld
Jitterbit 1.0 lets you automate the migration of data from one source
to another. The UI is simple, and Jitterpaks encourage sharing
mechanisms among users. The initial version may only interact with
some of the most basic protocols (FTP, ODBC) and file formats
(CSV, XML), but the price is reasonable and the product is growing
fast. The Open source community edition is free; the professional
version with support and training starts at $10,000. Jitterbit
encourages users to share some of these integration operations with
one another by providing an abstracted version of the XML that acts
as source code, known as a Jitterpak. Jitterpaks, incidentally, are
limited to sources and targets built into the current version of
Jitterbit: Web sites, FTP sites, Web services, and ODBC-compliant
databases. I'm hoping that future versions will include the ability
to move information in and out of other file types, including e-mail,
Excel files, and PDFs.
W3C Working Draft on Efficient XML Interchange Measurements
Greg White, Don Brutzman, Stephen Williams; Working Draft Note
W3C announced that its Efficient XML Interchange Working Group has
released a First Public Working Draft of the "Efficient XML
Interchange Measurements" specification as a Note. The draft
presents an analysis of the expected performance characteristics
of a potential Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) encoding format,
including the "compactness" and "processing efficiency" properties.
It also outlines plans for future updates. The document starts by
describing the context in which this analysis is being made, and
the position of an efficient format in the landscape of high
performance XML strategies. Then is describes the measured quantities
in detail and the test framework in which they were made. A short
description of each format is included. The W3C Efficient XML
Interchange Working Group was chartered to define an alternative
encoding of the XML Information Set that addresses the requirements
identified by the XML Binary Characterization Working Group, while
maintaining the existing interoperability between XML applications
and XML specifications.
See also: the Working Group
On Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)
Assaf Arkin, Blog
Over the past couple of years, the Business Process Modeling Notation
(BPMN) has established itself as the de-facto standard for process
modeling. Nevertheless, an impedance mismatch exists between BPMN and
BPEL, one of its target execution languages. This article presents the
view of Assaf Arkin, Intalio CTO and co-author of the BPML and BPEL
specifications, on this critical subject. BPMN is said to be a generic
process modeling language, but that's an illusion. Generic modeling
languages are descriptive but not prescriptive, they need shapes, not
constraints. BPMN is first and foremost a visual notation for some
machine processable language. It's a hypothetical execution language
that's attempting to abstract BPEL and closely match it. Just not
close enough. There's no reason why you can't have an underlying model
that maps well to BPEL. But practically, too many things are lost in
translation. What I'd like to see: Make the decision to marry BPMN and
BPEL to get the semantic gap solved for at least one language. One
is better than none. Fix all the bugs in the spec. Concrete features
are more interesting than abstract possibilities. And donate the code
base to Eclipse. Open source has a great way of solving
interoperability problems, and allowing more vendors to participate.
Q&A: Sun's Simon Phipps Details Open-Source Strategy
Todd Weiss, ComputerWorld
Phipps: "[Sun has] actually stepped up the rate of contribution. Code
talks. We've released Unix as open-source software by taking the
Solaris source code. Right now, we're in the mix of putting as much as
possible of our software products into open-source, including Java and
NetBeans tools. For various reasons, Java has gotten people's attention
as it goes into open-source, but that's just one product where we will
do this. [About open-sourcing Java:] You can't just slap a license on
things. You have to be sure that you have the rights to every line of
code. So we have to work through all sorts of issues — legal, access,
encumbrances, relationships with Java licensees. All of these issues
will take time to resolve. I don't think it's going to be very long at
all [for Java]. We have staffers who have instructions that it's going
to be open-source. They will get it done, and they will get it done
soon. With Solaris, Sun lawyers worked on the ownership issues with
that code for nearly five years before Solaris was made available for
open-source. It's not going to take that long with Java. The next set
of things after Java is open-sourced will be middleware products,
including a portal server, an identity server and a Web server. All of
those things are being considered for open-source. This will happen
between now and next year. During this financial year [for the company],
you can expect to see the lion's share of these products be announced
for open-source."
Use XMLBeans to Create a Web Service Client
Shailesh K. Mishra, IBM developerWorks
Apache XMLBeans is an open source, XML and Java-binding tool based
on the StAX specification. XMLBeans can be used to generate Java
classes and interfaces from an XML Schema. The generated Java classes
may be used to parse or generate XML documents that conform to the
schema, and fortunately, XMLBeans provide intuitive ways to handle
the XML to make it easier for you to access and manipulate XML data
and documents in Java. Some of the characteristics of the XMLBeans
approach to XML. (1) XMLBeans provide a familiar Java object-based
view of XML data while retaining access to the original, native XML
structure. (2) XML integrity as a document is retained with XMLBeans:
XML-oriented APIs commonly take the XML apart in order to bind to its
parts; with XMLBeans, the entire XML instance document is handled as
a whole. The XML data is stored in memory as XML. This means that the
document order is preserved as well as the original element content
with whitespace. (3) With types generated from schema, access to XML
instances is through JavaBean-like accessors, with get and set methods.
(4) XMLBeans is designed with XML schema in mind from the beginning
— XMLBeans supports all XML schema definitions. (5) Access to XML
is fast. This tutorial will help you write a Web service client using
XMLBeans. We generate schemas from a WSDL file, compile them, and
finally generate Java source from the compiled schemas. Once we are
ready with the Java source, we can easily prepare SOAP message and
send it to the Web service URL. This allows you the freedom from
having to manually author SOAP messages, and from having to do the
serialization and deserialization of custom Java objects.
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