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XML and Web Services In The News - 25 August 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP
HEADLINES:
OASIS Publishes Public Review Draft for WS-Reliable Messaging and WS-Reliable Messaging Policy Assertion Version 1.1
Staff, OASIS
OASIS announced that its Web Services Reliable Exchange (WS-RX) TC
has approved the following specification set as a Committee Draft and
voted to submit the package for public review: (1) Web Services Reliable
Messaging v1.1, (2) Web Services Reliable Messaging Policy Assertion
v1.1. WS-ReliableMessaging describes a protocol that allows messages to
be transferred reliably between nodes implementing this protocol in the
presence of software component, system, or network failures. The protocol
is described in the specification in a transport-independent manner,
allowing it to be implemented using different network technologies. To
support interoperable Web services, a SOAP binding is defined. The
WS-RM Policy specification describes a domain-specific policy assertion
for WS-ReliableMessaging (WSRM) that that can be specified within a
policy alternative as defined in WS-Policy Framework. The public review
began on 24 August 2006 and ends 21 October 2006. Members of the TC
encourage feedback from potential users, developers and others.
See also: Gilbert Pilz's overview
W3C Announces XML Query Test Suite (XQTS) Version 1.0
Staff, W3C
On behalf of the W3C XML Query Working Group and the XSL Working Group,
Andrew Eisenberg announced the availability of version 1.0 of the XML
Query Test Suite (XQTS). XQTS provides a set of metrics for determining
whether the W3C XML Query Language can be implemented interoperably as
published. It will help implementers identify possible problems both
with the Specification and with their software. XQTS 1.0 contains over
15,000 test cases. The catalog contains general information on the test
suite as well as test descriptions for each of the test cases included
in this release. Test queries and expected results are contained in
individual files. Implementors are encouraged to run this test suite
and request that they provide feedback by September 29, 2006. If enough
positive results are received, the team will be able to request a
transition to Proposed Recommendation. In this release, 230 test cases
have been added, including a small number of tests for fn:collection.
To date, the team has received the results for several implementations
of XQuery: Saxon-SA, xq2xsl, X-Hive/DB, xbird/open, XQuest,Qizx/open,
and one anonymous implementation. A report that reflects these results
is available from the web page. Michael Kay (Saxonica Limited) published
a report for Saxon-SA which shows a 100% pass rate in all categories
entered; the only categories where tests were not run were static typing
and XQueryX trivial embedding.
See also: Saxon-SA XQuery Test Suite Results
Comment Lines: My Top 10 Web Services Issues
Andre Tost, IBM developerWorks
"I spend much of my time with architects and developers talking about
the issues they face when designing and building solutions based on Web
services and SOA. There are a number of issues, questions, and topics
(which spark spirited debate) that surface over and over again, and so
I thought I would share what has become my personal Top 10 list of Web
services-related issues with you. Note that I am not calling these best
practices, simply because for many of them, there is no easy answer. By
contrast, others have been answered many times, and for these I will
just point you to my favorite resource that investigates the subject in
more detail." Examples: Web services are slow &emdash; or are they?; My XML
schema doesn't work with your products; What about UDDI? Is anyone
using it?; The synchrony of Web services; To ESB or not to ESB; How
many (Web) services will I end up with?...
Building Mashup Portlets
Jai Suri and Marina Sum, Sun Developer Network
Lately, with the availability of developer APIs from Web-service
giants, such as Google, Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon, Web mashups have
gained a lot of attention. According to ProgrammableWeb, a Web mashup
is "a Web page or application that combines data from two or more
external online sources. The external sources are typically other Web
sites and their data may be obtained by the mashup developer in various
ways, including, but not limited to APIs, XML feeds, and screenscraping."
To build a mashup, you need access to a minimum of two data sources
that can be combined to create a service, which is not otherwise
available from either source. Popular mashups, such as Housing Maps
and Chicago Crime, make use of a geospatial data service, such as
Google Maps or Yahoo Maps, as one of those sources. Other mashups offer
product listings, ratings, auction prices, and so forth by combining
catalog data from Amazon with auction data from eBay. This article
describes how to build a mashup portlet that can aggregate geospatial
data from data sources and combine it with an online mapping service
based on Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) to generate a mashup.
Included are the portlet's source code and techniques for deploying
the portlet to Sun Java System Portal Server 7; at the end of the
article is a list of reference resources. Even though JavaScript and
AJAX are rapidly catching up as the Web development technique of
choice, open issues abound. In particular, standardization of the
format for geospatial data feeds remains in debate.
Massachusetts to Use Microsoft Office in ODF Plan
Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com
Massachusetts will begin using OpenDocument as the default document
format later this year as planned, but it will be sticking with
Microsoft Office in the near term, the state's top technology executive
said. As expected, Louis Gutierrez, chief information officer of
Massachusetts' Information Technology Division, on Wednesday sent a
letter to advocates of people with disabilities. The letter was in
response to their concerns about the commonwealth's plan to move to the
OpenDocument format, or ODF, standard. In addition, Gutierrez last week
wrote to the state's Information Technology Advisory Board with an
update on the OpenDocument format implementation plan, as had been
planned. Last year, Massachusetts caught international attention for
its decision to standardize by January 2007 on ODF, a document format
standard not supported in Microsoft Office. Gutierrez told Massachusetts
officials that keeping Microsoft Office on state desktops enables the
state to "thread the needle" by adhering to a document standard created
and supported by multiple software providers without being opposed to,
"anti," any one vendor. Because Microsoft Office and the forthcoming
Office 2007 do not support OpenDocument natively, many expected the
state to move to a different productivity suite. Keeping Office,
however, makes the ODF implementation more economical and less
disruptive to end users, Gutierrez wrote to state officials. Microsoft
started its own OpenDocument format plug-in effort earlier this year
by sponsoring an open-source project.
See also: the letter
Metadata and the Windows Vista Photo Gallery
Scott Dart, Blog
Windows Vista makes some improvements to the metadata system for
photos. For example, here is some of the new information available in
Windows Vista: Tags; Date Taken; Rating; Caption; Image Resolution;
Camera make/model; Shutter speed; Some of this information is written
to the photo by your camera (e.g. shutter speed, date taken, camera
make/model). Some of it is added by you in an application like the
Windows Vista Photo Gallery (e.g. tags, captions, and ratings). In the
past, you may have used third-party image management applications that
allowed you to add tags (or other metadata) to your photos, only to
find out later that those tags were locked in a private database that
only that application could read. In Windows Vista, the metadata you
apply to your photos is part of the photo, and available to any
application that knows how to read it. There are a number of competing
standards for imaging metadata. That is, different ways of reading and
writing metadata for photos. One of the biggest standards, EXIF, is
commonly written to photos by most cameras, but has many limitations.
It's somewhat antiquated, fragile, not very flexible, and doesn't
support international languages like Japanese very well. IPTC is a
standard that is used pretty widely in journalism applications, but
is undergoing a transformation towards an XMP-based system. XMP is an
extensible framework for embedding metadata in files that was developed
by Adobe, and is the foundation for our 'truth is in the file' goal.
All metadata written to photos by Windows Vista will be written to XMP
(always directly to the file itself, never to a 'sidecar' file). When
reading metadata from photos on Windows Vista, we will first look for
XMP metadata, but if we don't find any, we'll also look for legacy EXIF
and IPTC metadata as well. If we find legacy metadata, we'll write
future changes back to both XMP and the legacy metadata blocks to
improve compatibility with legacy applications.
The XSLDataGrid: XSLT Rocks Ajax
Lindsey Simon, XML.com
Most web applications have a requirement somewhere in their interface
for a tabular view of data &emdash; often, a view of the rows in a database
table. In some cases, the use of a static HTML 'TABLE' [element] is
appropriate, but users have become increasingly accustomed to richer,
more malleable interfaces that let them change column widths, order,
etc. Among the application widgets in the web developer's toolbox, the
dynamic datagrid is an often cumbersome one to set up. This article
will outline a datagrid component powered by XSLT and JavaScript that
aims to achieve easy setup, high performance, and minimum dependence.
The greatest advantage to using XSLT for a JavaScript widget is the
flexibility it provides for instantiation. Most Ajax-using web
developers will be working with a server-side component/language, and
having the option to reduce a client-side JavaScript decoration step
to improve performance is nice, though it comes with a bandwidth price.
In many projects, developers may be faced with a mixed bag: they may
have a need for some large dynamic datagrids, which can only be
originated on the server, as well as some smaller hand-coded tables,
where a less-rich datagrid would be fine. For instance, developers might
not always want to capture the fact that a user changed a column's size
and store it as a preference, but even for these less-rich datagrids,
developers do want them to look and feel the same. The XSLT approach
gives the developer an opportunity to choose either a client- or
server-based technique to achieve a similar result.
Gartner Sees Boom after OASIS, Other Deliver their Roadmaps
Barbara Gengler, SAP INFO International
Companies are still dealing with the age-old problem of integrating
disparate processes, disparate systems and disparate data across their
enterprise. Business Process Management on an enterprise-wide Business
Process Platform offers a solution but researchers at Gartner emphasize
that interoperability based on standards between the products of the
BPM vendors is crucial. At the start of 2006, there were more than 140
suppliers of BPM-enabling technology, most of them supplying specialty
tools rather than BPMSs. By 2009, 20 percent of business processes of
Global 2000 companies will be supported on BPMSs. With regard to
interoperability between different business process models, the OASIS
international standards consortium earlier this year confirmed its
members have approved the Business-Centric Methodology (BCM) version 1.0
as an OASIS standard. BCM is a set of layered methods for acquiring
interoperable e-business information within communities of interest.
The BCM OASIS standard acts as a road map, enabling companies to
identify and exploit business success factors in a technology-neutral
manner, based on open standards. BCM complements positively Enterprise
Architectures (EA), service-oriented architectures (SOA), WS-Reliability,
ebXML Messaging, UDDI and frameworks such as the Federal Architecture
Reference Models. James Bryce Clark, director of standards, development,
OASIS said standards create safety: "People who build on open standards
are better insulated from single source and vendor lock-in."
SOA Development with Axis2
Deepal Jayasinghe, IBM developerWorks
Apache Axis2 is the successor to the Apache Axis SOAP project. It is a
major improvement of the Web services core engine and aims to be the
platform for the next generation of Web services and Service-Oriented
Architecture (SOA). It is becoming increasingly popular by being a
clean and extensible open source Web services platform. The
architecture of Axis2 is highly flexible and supports much additional
functionality such as reliable messaging and security. However, Axis2
is not just the new Web service framework of Apache. It is also
shaped by experiences from the Axis 1.x family and the advancements in
the Web service stack during the last two years. One of the main
reasons for introducing Axis2 was to perform better in terms of speed
and memory &emdash; despite the fact that new features and functionalities
are added. Most of the new features are to make the Axis2 easier to use,
while keeping room for extending functionality in various ways. The
key areas where most of the new features are added: (1) New XML Object
Model &emdash; AXIOM; (2) Messaging-based core; (3) Improved deployment Model;
(4) Pluggable data binding; (5) New Client API; (6) Information
Processing model. Axis2 will not prove web services concepts but will
provide a better SOAP processing model, with considerable increase in
performance of both speed and memory with respect to Axis 1.x and other
existing web service engines. In addition it provides the user with a
convenient API for deployment service, extending core functionality
and new client programming model.
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