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XML and Web Services In The News - 21 July 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Sun Microsystems
HEADLINES:
Oracle Packs SOA in PeopleSoft Tools Upgrade
By Dawn Kawamoto, CNET News.com
Oracle has launched PeopleTools 8.48, an upgrade designed to offer Web
services functionality and serve as an entry point into Oracle's
Fusion Middleware. PeopleTools 8.48 is designed to enhance users'
ability to support the use of Web services and tie in both custom and
legacy applications with PeopleSoft enterprise software. Oracle's
latest PeopleSoft tools upgrade also is designed to allow users to
certify their tools with Oracle's Fusion Middleware — part of the
company's major Fusion initiative, which aims to meld the technology
of its various acquisitions into a new architecture. When used in
conjunction with Oracle Fusion Middleware Enterprise Portal,
PeopleTools is designed to serve as a point of access for all
enterprise applications. In addition, Web services created from
PeopleTools' Service Designer and Integration Broker can be automated
and orchestrated via Oracle's Fusion Middleware BPEL Process Manager.
Among other new tools included in the launch is PeopleSoft Change
Impact Analyzer, designed to allow customers to study the effect of
prospective changes to their applications. Also, Oracle XML Publisher
is now integrated into PeopleTools, increasing the number of options
for customized reports.
Amazon's Pragmatic Approach To Metered Infrastructure
Jon Udell, InfoWorld
In March 2006, Amazon.com introduced S3 (Simple Storage Service), a
metered storage service for arbitrary blobs of data. Recently,
Amazon's adventure in metered Web services continued with the
announcement that its SQS (Simple Queue Service), which had been in
beta since well before the surprise announcement of S3, has now
joined S3 as a commercial offering. Like S3, SQS is an extremely
general-purpose service offering that will undoubtedly be used in ways
nobody can predict. It's therefore appropriate that Amazon has tailored
both services to the broadest possible swath of developers. I haven't
explored SQS in detail yet, but it looks a lot like S3 — that is, a
pragmatic mix of REST (Representational State Transfer), SOAP, plain
old XML, and HTTP. You can layer WS-* standards on top of the SOAP
interfaces, but Amazon itself hasn't (at least not yet). Nor does it
yet support advanced storage or messaging standards, such as WebDAV,
JSR 170, or JMS. Why not? A service based on those advanced standards
would have a fairly high activation threshold. To cross over you'd
have to acquire a toolkit and learn how to use it. For lots of
potential applications, though, that would be overkill. You just need
to know that you can reliably store data and metadata in the cloud,
serve it robustly from there, pump messages reliably, and pay a
competitive rate. Advanced toolkits are great when you need to use
advanced infrastructure, but there's a trade-off. When you rely on a
toolkit's encapsulation of a service, you don't really understand how
the service works. Sometimes that's necessary, but in the case of S3
and SQS, it isn't. S3's REST interface, for example, is encapsulated
by Amazon's own Java and .Net libraries, and also by third-party
Python, Ruby, and other libraries.
Use JBI Components for Integration
Adrien Louis, Java World
This article discusses the Java Business Integration specification and
describes more specifically the concept of "component" as defined in
this specification. The author introduces JBI's main goals and then
extensively explains how components communicate through the JBI
environment, as well as the component installation process. The article
and its example are based on Petals, an open source JBI-compliant
container. From a component point of view, using JBI and communicating
with the environment is quite simple. The use of WSDL for service
description, XML for message payload, and the JBI specification itself
promote the standardization of state-of-the-art integration. JBI
defines a container that can host components. Two kinds of components
can be plugged into a JBI environment: (1) Service engines provide
logic in the environment, such as XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language)
transformation or BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)
orchestration. (2) Binding components are sort of "connectors" to
external services or applications. They allow communication with
various protocols, such as SOAP, Java Message Service, or ebXML. JBI
is built on top of state-of-the-art SOA standards: service definitions
are described in WSDL (Web Services Description Language), and
components exchange XML messages in a document-oriented-model way.
The success of JBI will depend on the plethora of proposed components,
either service engines that apply some integration logic to messages
or binding components that open the JBI bus to specific protocols.
Providers of JBI containers must propose a pertinent set of components
with their containers.
Grady Booch: Avoid the 'Stupid' SOA Approach
Joab Jackson, Government Computer News
This article presents an interview with Grady Booch, software designer.
A few months ago, when famed software designer Grady Booch spoke before
a packed auditorium in Washington, he tried to temper some of the
fevered expectations swirling about services-oriented architectures,
describing where SOA would and would not be useful. Booch: "There is
way too much hype about [SOA]. The idea of services is not a means of
abstraction. It is simply a mechanism for reaching into systems. You
see organizations rushing to [implement] services, but they are really
missing the fundamental engineering principles. In about 18 months,
they will complain SOA doesn't work. They'll be blaming the wrong thing.
They should be blaming their architectures and best practices. I did
some work with Homeland Security folks two months ago, and — this is
gross simplification — they said, 'What we want to do is cut across
silos, plant some services, so we can get into the data and do cool
things.' And I told them that that is really a very stupid approach.
The wrong approach is to look at the silos, identify interesting data
and plant a service on it. The right direction is to lay out the
scenarios you want to carry out, and see where they touch silos. A
point of tangency is where there might be an opportunity for a service.
Services should not be driven bottom up from technology, as DHS folks
are proposing, but rather from the top down — with the use cases.
This is not to say SOA is a bad thing. Like any technology, you have
to approach it in meaningful ways. SOA is very useful for gluing
systems together, but it does not address the internal architectures
of systems.
See also: OASIS Reference Model for SOA
Specifying Language in XHTML and HTML Content
Richard Ishida (ed); W3C Working Draft
W3C has announced the release of a new version of "Internationalization
Best Practices: Specifying Language in XHTML and HTML Content",
updating the 2005-02-24 Working Draft. The document has been prepared
by the Internationalization GEO (Guidelines, Education & Outreach)
Working Group of the W3C Internationalization Activity. Specifying the
language of content is useful for a wide number of applications, from
linguistically sensitive searching to applying language-specific
display properties. In some cases the potential applications for
language information are still waiting for implementations to catch up,
whereas in others, such as detection of language by voice browsers, it
is a necessity today. On the other hand, adding markup for language
information to content is something that can and should be done today.
Without it, it will not be possible to take advantage of any future
developments. This document is one of a series of documents providing
HTML authors with best practices for developing internationalized HTML
using XHTML 1.0 or HTML 4.01, supported by CSS1, CSS2 and some aspects
of CSS3. It focuses specifically on advice about specifying the
language of content. Language declarations in HTML and XHTML do not,
and should not, provide information about character encoding or the
direction of text. Some people think that information about language
can be inferred from the character encoding, but this is not true.
There must be a one-to-one mapping between encoding and language for
this to work, and there isn't. A single character encoding such as
ISO 8859-1 (Latin1), could encode both French and English, as well as
a great many other languages. In addition, different character
encodings can be used for a single language, eg, Arabic could be
encoded with 'Windows-1256' or 'ISO 8859-6' or 'UTF-8'.
See also: Markup and Multilingualism
W3C Workshop on Languages for Privacy Policy Negotiation
Staff, W3C Announcement
W3C has announced a Call for Participation in "W3C Workshop on
Languages for Privacy Policy Negotiation and Semantics-Driven
Enforcement." The Workshop will be held on 17-18 October 2006 at the
Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy.
Vendors and researchers will meet to discuss privacy for personal data,
automated policy negotiation in Web services, Web applications and
identity management, and the use of Semantic Web technologies for
privacy enforcement. Participation is open to W3C Members and to the
public. This Workshop tries to bring together the IT-industry with a
need for the management of personal data like e-health, customer
relation management, new online community services etc on the one hand
and privacy researchers from all over the world on the other hand. The
workshop is expected to consider the applicability of and lessons
learned from existing and emerging technologies in privacy and user-
centric identity management, including XACML, P3P, APPEL, and emerging
solutions and approaches from the vendor and research communities. The
workshop is also expected to consider the applicability of Semantic Web
technologies to privacy enforcement use cases. Technologies to be
covered: (1) interactions between users and enterprises, personal data
that need to be requested and exchanged, along with policies that talk
about these data — modelling approaches, vocabularies, and ontologies
that connect policies; (2) languages that could contribute to a
(possibly simple) negotiation process between users and enterprises,
or between different enterprises; (3) back-end processes and cross-
enterprise data exchanges need to allow an interoperable control of
data use.
See also: the W3C news item
Start-Ups Team to Push Open-Source Boundaries
By Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com
A handful of start-ups are trying to upset the stodgy world of
enterprise systems management software with open source and a more
democratic approach to setting industry standards. The Open
Management Consortium of small vendors has attracted entrenched
enterprise systems management vendors which are expected to join the
open-source standardization effort. The creation of the consortium
highlights how open-source business models are starting to influence
the stodgy world of enterprise systems management. Already, open source
has left an indelible mark in many fields, such as operating systems
and databases. Administrators use systems management software to
monitor company networks to spot problems and track performance of
hardware. The multibillion-dollar market is dominated by Hewlett-
Packard, IBM, BMC Software and CA. Microsoft is also investing heavily
in this area. In addition to making viable open-source management
products, the management consortium intends to improve industry
standardization, which should lead to greater interoperability between
different products. For example, a developer could create a plug-in
application to share performance information between different network
monitoring programs. [Consortium co-founder William] Hurley said he
intends to involve customers more in the Open Management Consortium.
He argued that management-related standards efforts until now have
been dominated by vendors.
See also: Open Management Consortium web site
DWR Makes Interportlet Messaging With Ajax Easy
Sami Salkosuo, IBM developerWorks
Portlets are Java platform-based applications for Web portals. JSR-168,
a Java Community Process standard for developing portlet applications,
addresses portlet lifecycle management, portlet container contracts,
packaging, deployment, and other aspects related to portals.
Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, or Ajax, is a technique for developing
rich, interactive Web applications. Ajax uses a combination of XML,
HTML, DHTML, JavaScript, and DOM. Portlets and Ajax would seem to be
a perfect fit for one another, as they are both focused on using a Web
browser as the vehicle for presenting a UI to the user. An easy way to
combine the two with Java technology is to use the DWR library. DWR is
a Java library, open sourced under the Apache license, for building
Ajax-based Web applications. DWR's basic purpose is to hide Ajax
details from the developer. You use plain old Java objects (POJOs) on
the server side, and DWR dynamically generates JavaScript proxy
functions so that client-side development with JavaScript feels like
calling JavaBeans directly. The main component of DWR is a Java servlet
that handles calls from browser to server. This article uses DWR to
build a sample Ajax application based on three portlets. With DWR,
it's almost as if JavaBeans were available in the browser. DWR
simplifies your work by hiding almost all the details of Ajax and
allows you to concentrate on the task at hand instead of the nuts and
bolts of Ajax development.
Intalio Release First Zero Code BPMS
Staff, DMReview.com
Intalio, The Open Source BPMS Company, announced the release of Intalio
BPMS 4.2, the first BPMS to support Zero Code development for complex
business processes that include Web services orchestration and Web-
based human workflow. Intalio BPMS 4.2 takes advantage of the latest
AJAX technologies to support the development of web-based forms for
human workflow. This new release adds a WYSIWYG form designer built as
an Eclipse plugin, and supports the graphical definition of complex
pageflows, also known as guided procedures, making the development of
multi-step workflow tasks a rather trivial exercise. It also provides
easier deployment on top of the Apache Geronimo application server,
as well as a new web-based management console for system administrators.
"Over the past nine to twelve months, we have seen increasing customer
demand for supporting industry standards such as BPMN and BPEL, largely
motivated by the adoption of the service-oriented architecture model,"
said Ismael Ghalimi. "BPM is SOA's killer application, while SOA is
BPM's enabling infrastructure. This puts Intalio and the Open Source
Intalio BPMS in a perfect position to ride this second wave of BPM,
while significantly reducing the barrier to adoption for customers."
See also: on Zero Code
Free and Open Source Software at the United Nations
David Boswell, O'Reilly ONLamp.com
Advances in technology have revolutionized the way people live, learn
and work, but these benefits have not spread around the world evenly.
A digital divide exists between communities in their access to
computers, the Internet, and other technologies. The United Nations
is aware of the importance of including technology development as part
of a larger effort to bridge this global digital divide. This article
looks at how various United Nations agencies use free and open source
software to meet the goal of putting technology at the service of people
around the world. To help raise awareness of the potential for free and
open source software in this area, various UN organizations and
nonprofits have created the FOSS: Policy and Development Implications
(FOSS-PDI) initiative. Part of this initiative consists of a mailing
list that discusses specific FOSS applications that address the
different MDGs, information about how different countries are using
open source software, and coordination for events being planned around
the world.
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