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XML and Web Services In The News - 28 August 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Sun Microsystems
HEADLINES:
BEA Advancing High-Performance Apps Platform
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
BEA Systems on Monday is launching an upgrade to its high-performance
application platform, WebLogic Real Time Core Edition 1.1, featuring
lower latency and runtime analysis. The product includes the WebLogic
Express 9.2 application server and adds the JRockit Runtime Analyzer
tool, providing detailed information on the Java virtual machine and
the application that is running. The tool detects memory leaks. Maximum
response times have been improved to 30 milliseconds in Version 1.1,
from 100 milliseconds in the previous version, said Jim Sherburne,
director of product marketing for the Real Time product at BEA. Calling
the software the industry's only Java-based runtime, BEA says the
product provides fast, predictable response times and leverages Java
infrastructure. It also enables users to focus on business
functionality; not on maintaining C or C++ code, which have been
commonly used in high-performance applications. An augmented version
of the JRockit JVM is included in the package, featuring deterministic
garbage collection to define pauses for memory recovery in service-
level agreements. This prevents pauses that could last an unacceptably
long time and impact application performance. The Real Time software
is intended for users in areas such as financial services,
manufacturing, telecommunications and government who want to take
advantage of Java infrastructure.
See also: the PR
CSS Module: Namespaces
Elika J. Etemad (ed)., W3C Working Draft
W3C announced the publication of a "CSS Module: Namespaces" Working
Drft, updating the previous version of 1999-06-25. Produced by members
of the W3C CSS Working Group as part of the Style Activity, this CSS
module defines the syntax for using namespaces in CSS. It introduces
the '@namespace' rule for declaring the default namespace and binding
namespaces to namespace prefixes, and it defines a syntax that other
specifications can adopt for using those prefixes in namespace-
qualified names. A CSS client that does not support this module will
(if it properly conforms to CSS forward compatible parsing rules)
ignore all '@namespace' rules, as well as all style rules that make
use of namespace qualified names. The syntax of delimiting namespace
prefixes in CSS was deliberately chosen so that these CSS clients would
ignore the style rules rather than possibly match them incorrectly...
In CSS Namespaces, as in XML Namespaces, the local prefix is merely a
syntactic construct; it is the expanded name (the tuple of local name
and namespace) that is significant. Thus the actual prefixes used in
a CSS style sheet, and whether they are defaulted or not, are
independent of the namespace prefixes used in the markup and whether
these are defaulted or not... The namespace prefix is declared only
within the style sheet in which its '@namespace' rule appears, and
not any style sheets imported by that style sheet, style sheets that
import that style sheet, or any other style sheets applying to the
document...
See also: the W3C Style Activity
Sun Likes Media Grid
Paul Shread, IT Planet.com
Sun Microsystems is collaborating with the MediaGrid.org open
standards group to help advance international standards for storing,
delivering and processing digital media in grid computing environments.
As part of the collaboration, Sun said it will seamlessly connect its
on-demand Sun Grid compute utility to the public Media Grid network
so Media Grid service requests and jobs can be handled by Sun Grid,
increasing the quality of service and overall performance of the
Media Grid network. The partnership will provide a "real-world gateway
implementation and corresponding technical specifications upon which
Media Grid application standards" &emdash; such as those for rendering,
gaming and virtual reality &emdash; can be built, said Aaron Walsh, director
of the Grid Institute's MediaGrid.org standards organization. Aisling
MacRunnels, senior director of utility computing at Sun, said the
combined platform "will enable the media and entertainment, healthcare,
aerospace and education markets to complete a wide range of
applications not possible with today's computational limitations...
Sun will contribute its grid computing expertise to help translate
these emerging, real-world uses of a grid-based digital media
infrastructure into open standards for the storage, delivery and
processing of digital media." As part of the collaboration, Dan Hushon,
senior director and chief technologist of Sun Grid, has been appointed
to a one-year fellowship to participate in the development of Media
Grid standards.
Apache Abdera: An Open Source Atom Implementation
James Snell, Apache Posting
The Apache Abdera developer community has announced its first developer
preview release (version 0.1.0-incubating), with binary and source
distributions for Java 1.5 and Java 1.4.2. The goal of the Apache
Abdera project is to build a functionally-complete, high-performance
implementation of the IETF Atom Syndication Format (RFC 4287) and Atom
Publishing Protocol (in-progress) specifications. Abdera is an effort
undergoing incubation at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF),
sponsored by the Apache Incubator PMC. Incubation is required of all
newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the
infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have
stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects.
While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the
completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the
project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. The release supports:
(1) Parsing Atom Syndication Format 1.0 Feeds; (2) Serializing Atom
Syndication Format 1.0 Feeds; (3) Extensions; (4) XML Digital Signature
and XML Encryption; (5) A high performance incremental parsing model;
(6) Feed Object Model API.
See also: Atom references
Privacy Preserving Trust Authorization Framework Using XACML
Uche Mbanaso, Grahame Cooper et al.,, Conference Paper
This research paper was presented at the IEEE 2006 International
Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks:
"Nowadays many organizations share sensitive services through open
network systems and this raises the need for an authorization framework
that can interoperate even when the parties have no pre-existing
relationships. Trust Negotiation is the process used to establish these
first relationships, through the transfer of attributes, embedded in
digital credentials, between the two parties. However, these attributes
may themselves be considered sensitive and so may need protection from
disclosure. In some environments, the policies that govern the protected
services may also be considered sensitive and their release to arbitrary
strangers may leak confidential business information. This paper
describes a way to unify the protection of services, sensitive
credentials and policies in a synchronized trustworthy manner. We
propose a trust authorization framework (TAF) that builds on the
capabilities of XACML to support the bilateral exchange of policies and
credentials through trust negotiation... We demonstrate how the XACML
model can be explored to enable privacy and trust whilst protecting
access to electronic resources in a synchronized manner. We describe
how to construct effective trust policy sets, which can optimize trust
establishment sessions, and propose a new trust layer component in the
primitive XACML model. We have leveraged trust concepts already proposed
by researchers and show how our model optimistically addresses the
problem of probing attacks such that the risk to which a party is
exposed at any point in the negotiation can be minimized. Our framework
has the capabilities to protect resources, policies and credentials
simultaneously in distributed environment for users with or without
pre-existing trust relationships. The implementation of this framework
is in an advanced stage using the Sun XACML implementation and the
PERMIS Attribute Verifier subsystem."
See also: the OASIS XACML TC
Jitterbit Goes Open Source for Application 'Glue'
Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com
A start-up company called Jitterbit has set out to enter the crowded
market for integration software using open source and a modular product
design. The company, which is expected to release an update to its
namesake software on Monday, has developed software for transferring
data from one application to another. For example, a company could use
the server for moving an order transaction from an e-commerce system
to its customer support database. This application-to-application
integration software is meant to complement lower-level messaging
software, such as an enterprise service bus product, said Sharam Sasson,
the president and CEO of Jitterbit. There are a number of open-source
integration servers, including ServiceMix and Mule, that are built
around standards, such as Java Messaging Service and Java Business
Integration. Jitterbit has developed its software to be extensible by
open-source developers, Sasson said. The product comes with client-side
software for designing programs that suit a specific purpose, such as
integration between SAP and Peoplesoft applications. These individual
integration programs, or "Jitterpaks," can be shared with others and
extended, which will speed up installation time. The company's product
performs a function similar to that performed by an appliance offered
by Cast Iron Systems.
See also: InfoWorld
Efficient Web Service Discovery and Composition Using Constraint Logic Programming
Srividya Kona, Ajay Bansal, Gopal Gupta, Thomas Hite, Conference Paper
This paper is published in the Proceedings of the ICLP 2006 Workshop on
Applications of Logic Programming in the Semantic Web and Semantic Web
Services (ALPSWS 2006). "Service-oriented computing is gaining wider
acceptance. For Web services to become practical, an infrastructure
needs to be supported that allows users and applications to discover,
deploy, compose and synthesize services automatically. This automation
can take place effectively only if formal semantic descriptions of Web
services are available. In this paper we present an approach for
automatic service discovery and composition with both syntactic and
semantic description of Web services. In syntactic case, we use a
repository of services described using WSDL (Web Service Description
Language). In the semantic case, the services are described using USDL
(Universal Service-Semantics Description Language), a language we have
developed for formally describing the semantics of Web services. In
this paper we show how the challenging task of building service
discovery and composition engines can be easily implemented and
efficiently solved via (Constraint) Logic programming techniques. We
evaluate the algorithms on repositories of different sizes and show
the results. To make services ubiquitously available we need a
semantics-based approach such that applications can reason about a
service's capability to a level of detail that permits their discovery,
deployment, composition and synthesis. Several efforts are underway
to build such an infrastructure. These efforts include approaches
based on the semantic web (such as USDL, OWL-S, WSML, WSDL-S) as well
as those based on XML, such as Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
Our solution produces accurate and quick results with both syntactic
and semantic description of Web services. We are able to apply many
optimization techniques to our system so that it works efficiently
even on large repositories. Use of Constraint Logic Programming
helped greatly in obtaining an efficient implementation of this system.
OASIS Public Review Draft for WS-ResourceMetadataDescriptor
Dan Jemiolo (ed), Public Review Draft Version 01
OASIS has announced the publication of "Web Services Resource Metadata
1.0 (WS-ResourceMetadataDescriptor)" as Public Review Draft, inviting
comments through 22-October-2006. Produced by the OASIS Web Services
Resource Framework TC, this document explains the need for metadata
in the context of WS-Resource Framework, proposing an information model
applicable to Manageable Resources and WS-Resources in general. The
components introduced by the WS Resource Framework (WSRF) address
functional aspects of modeling stateful resources (such as systems
resources) using Web services. WSRF uses WSDL as the form of service
description. There is a need to be able to supplement the descriptive
information available about a WS-Resource. WS-ResourceMetadataDescriptor
standardizes the form of the WS-Resource MetadataDescriptor that
contains metadata information about a WS-Resource's interface so that
clients of that interface may reason about implementations of the
interface at both design time and run time. The syntax of a preferred
XML serialization of the information model is also described.
See also: the announcement
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