|
XML and Web Services In The News - 26 July 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by BEA
HEADLINES:
BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP Ramp SOA Spec Efforts
Laurie Sullivan, TechWeb Technology News
An alliance of software vendors on Wednesday presented a progress
report on specifications that define a language-neutral programming
model for application development in service-oriented architecture
(SOA) platforms. Open Service Oriented Architecture, or OSOA, comprises
experts from rivals BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, SAP and others. The group
aims to develop a common programming model geared toward SOA, a method
to create and manage IT systems through reusable software code and
business processes for companies looking to deploy Web Services. Member
companies pulled resources to work on two projects: service component
architecture (SCA) and service data objects (SDO). SCA focuses on
defining models for creating and assembling service components for
building SOAs, while SDO provides a consistent method for data handling
within SOA applications. SAP AG vice president of industry standards
Michael Bechauf confirmed the companies hope to submit specification on
both concepts to a standards body, yet undetermined, this year. Since
November, about eight groups have been formed to focus on adding support
for more technologies to make SOA easier for developers to use,
according to Jeff Mischkinsky, director of Web services standards at
Oracle Corp. The SCA specifications now include support for business
process execution language (BPEL) and PHP hypertext preprocessor (PHP)
Web-scripting language to expand the range of technologies supported.
The OSOA specifications are made available to the community on a
Royalty Free basis for the creation of compatible implementations.
When mature, the intent is to hand these specifications over to a
suitable Standards Body for future shepherding.
See also: Open SOA Collaboration
Vendors Partner to Extend SOA Technologies
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
With interest in service-oriented architectures continuing to grow,
several leading technology vendors that have been working together
to create the SCA (Service Component Architecture) and SDO (Service
Data Objects) specifications have announced key achievements, including
a significant increase in industry involvement and advancements in the
development of SOA-related specifications and technologies. The group,
OSOA (Open Service Oriented Architecture), also launched a vendor-
neutral Web site to serve as an information resource for access to
draft specifications, white papers and other information. The SCA
specifications are designed to help simplify the creation and
composition of business services, while the SDO specifications focus
on uniform access to data residing in multiple locations and formats.
the group's work has already resulted in the development of new draft
SCA specifications for a declarative policy framework; improved
description of connectivity with bindings specifications for JMS
(Java Message System), JCA (J2EE Connector Architecture) and Web
services; and new BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) and PHP
authoring models. In addition, draft specifications for Service
Assembly. Java and C++ service authoring, and SDO have been updated,
the organization said. "As early partners in this effort, it's
exciting to see our collaboration expanded with innovative companies
that have also recognized the impact SCA and SDO specifications can
have in moving forward SOA adoption and deployments," Ed Cobb, vice
president of Architecture & Standards for BEA Systems, in San Jose,
Calif., said in a statement. "We're also encouraged by the technical
progress we've made since our original announcement late last year."
See also: the SCA news story
Building a Distributed, Standards-based Repository Federation
Robert Tansley, D-Lib Magazine
This article presents the architecture developed for the China Digital
Museum Project, a collaborative project involving the Chinese Ministry
of Education, Hewlett-Packard Company and several Chinese universities,
with Beihang University as the main technical partner. Repositories
(such as DSpace) in a federation can replicate metadata and content from
others by harvesting METS Dissemination Information Packages via OAI-PMH.
The CNRI Handle System is used to uniquely identify objects in the
federation and to keep track of their multiple locations. A central
registry of repositories in the federation allows participating
repositories to discover new repositories and changes to existing ones.
The central registry also features an "available mirrors" user interface,
which enables users to select which physical copy of an object to access.
Various use cases for the architecture are described, including the China
Digital Museum Project use case. This article also describes a federation
of Institutional Repositories sharing content and metadata for
preservation purposes. The overall architecture described in the article
consists of a number of repository nodes, each of which may provide an
OAI-PMH data provider interface to enable authorised repositories to
harvest METS Dissemination Information Packages (DIPS). These METS DIPs
are essentially manifests, containing the complete descriptive and
technical metadata for an Object, and including constituent bitstreams
by reference. This enables a harvesting repository to completely
replicate the underlying digital Object. The Replicating Repository,
as part of a regularly scheduled harvest, harvests information (in a
simple XML Schema) about the repositories in the federation, including
the Source Repository. This information is stored in its Local Registry.
The Replicating Repository, as part of a regular harvesting schedule,
harvests METS DIPs from the Source Repository. These will at the least
be XML Schema-validated.
See also: OAI-PMH
XHTML 2.0: New Working Draft
Jonny Axelsson, Mark Birbeck, et al (eds), W3C Working Draft
W3C's HTML Working Group has announced the release of an eighth public
Working Draft of XHTML 2.0. This release updates the previous version
of 2005-05-27. A general purpose markup language without presentation
elements, XHTML 2 is designed for representing documents for a wide
range of purposes across the Web. Much of XHTML 2 already works in
existing browsers. The upated draft includes an implementation in
RELAX NG, with DTD and XML Schema implementations to follow. XHTML 2
takes HTML back to its roots by removing all presentation elements,
and subordinating all presentation to style sheets. This gives greater
flexibility, greater accessibility, more device independence, and more
powerful presentation possibilities, since style sheets can do more
than the presentational elements of HTML ever did. The new 'section'
element, in conjunction with the 'h' element, offers a mechanism for
structuring documents into sections: it gives the author greater control
over presentation possibilities than the traditional implicit
structuring using numbered levels of headings. XHTML 2 introduces the
navigation list element 'nl', which codifies such parts of documents,
and allows different presentational idioms to be applied. An additional
advantage is for assistive technologies, that can allow the user to
skip such elements.
See also: the W3C HTML Activity
Technology Options for Rich Internet Applications
Vaibhav V. GadgeIBM developerWorks
Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) go beyond the standard limited set
of conventional user interface (UI) controls provided by HTML, such as
text boxes, checkboxes, or radio buttons. RIAs provide users with a
much richer set of controls, and a more sophisticated server interaction
mechanism. With RIAs, users don't have to refresh the page when they
submit data from a browser; they can refresh only a part of page, have
better error handling, and a lot more. In this overview of RIAs, the
author explains how to adapt them in the user interface (UI) layer.
Web developers and architects might be particularly interested in the
discussion of Laszlo, XUL, XForms, Macromedia Flex, and Dojo — the
common technologies currently available in this area. Links to other
technologies are also included.
Updated Draft TAG Finding on Extending and Versioning Languages
David Orchard and Norman Walsh, W3C TAG Draft
On behalf of the W3C Technical Architecture Group, David Orchard has
released an updated version of "Extending and Versioning Languages
Part 1" as a draft TAG Finding. The primary activity of the TAG is to
develop Architectural Recommendations; TAG findings document
fundamental principles that should be adhered to by all Web components.
This document provides terminology for discussing language versioning,
a number of questions that language designers must answer, and a
variety of version identification strategies. Versioning techniques are
designed to allow compatible changes with or without schema propagation.
A number of questions, design patterns and rules are discussed with a
focus towards enabling versioning in XML vocabularies, making use of
XML Namespaces and XML Schema constructs. This includes not only
general rules, but also rules for working with languages that provide
an extensible container model, notably SOAP. The inevitable evolution
of languages by adding, deleting, or changing syntax or semantics is
called versioning. Making versioning work in practice is one of the
most difficult problems in computing. Arguably, the Web rose
dramatically in popularity because evolution and versioning were built
into HTML and HTTP. Both systems provide explicit extensibility points
and rules for understanding extensions that enable their decentralized
extension and versioning.
See also: related TAG Findings
VERSIONS: User Requirements and Investigation of the Need for Standards
Louise Allsop, D-Lib Magazine
The VERSIONS Project addresses issues and uncertainties relating to
version identification in digital repositories and open access research
collections. VERSIONS is looking at researchers' attitudes and current
practice towards producing, archiving, disseminating and accessing
electronic papers at different stages in the lifecycle. The project
has a focus on eprints in economics, and takes a comparative view by
drawing on established partnerships with European libraries specialising
in economics. Information is being collected via a user requirements
study and a publications list analysis. The results will be used to
develop a set of guidelines on good practice in relation to version
identification, to produce a toolkit of guidelines for academic
researchers and to make recommendations on standards for versions.
See also: Open Management Consortium web site
Sugar 4.5 Gets 'AJAXed'
Sean Michael Kerner, InternetNews.com
With the 4.5 release of its open source CRM package, SugarCRM is
capitalizing on its growing popularity in the space, with downloads
doubling from 400,000 to 800,000 in six months and a Microsoft
partnership highlighting its growth. Sugar 4.5 is the eighth release
since the company launched in April 2004 and comes six months after
the last major release. "Prior to Sugar 4.5, Sugar has always been a
very fast lightweight HTML-based application written in PHP," John
Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM, told internetnews.com. "We've taken it a
step forward in 4.5 with the AJAX layer that makes it really
customizable from an end-user perspective. "We've completely AJAXed
pretty much the entire user interface so you can drag and drop
components to fit what makes sense for you as an individual," Roberts
added. The new release is also the first SugarCRM release since its
partnership with Microsoft earlier this year. Sugar 4.5 offers a
Windows-optimized version that will run on Microsoft's SQL Server.
SugarCRM is also now in the process of removing barriers for third-
party developers to profit from its platform. Sugarforge is the
SugarCRM community site where developers contribute and share their
enhancements and add-ons efforts for with SugarCRM. There are
currently some 220 projects listed on the site. SugarExchange.com,
which is in beta, goes a step further and helps commercial developers
by offering a forum where code can be sold.
XML.org is an OASIS Information Channel
sponsored by BEA Systems, Inc., IBM Corporation, Innodata Isogen, SAP AG and Sun
Microsystems, Inc.
Use http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage
to unsubscribe or change an email address. See http://xml.org/xml/news_market.shtml
for the list archives. |
