XML and Web Services In The News - 31 August 2005

Open-Source BI Stretches Beyond Reporting
Jacques Surveyer, Business Intelligence Pipeline
The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools Initiative (BIRT), from BI vendor Actuate and open-source community The Eclipse Foundation, is one of the more ambitious open BI reporting applications. BIRT is cross- platform, Eclipse-based, XML-driven and dedicated to delivering standardized output. But fast on BIRT's heels, two new organizations are promising broader BI application frameworks. The first of the upstarts, Pentaho, is adopting the BIRT reporting tool as part of a broader framework. The other, JasperSoft, is counting on building from the a bottom-up, starting with its existing reporting tool base. This article examines the components of the two open-source BI offerings. The impressive thing about Pentaho is that these BI veterans from Cognos, Hyperion, IBM, Lawson, Oracle and SAS designed a complete BI stack with reporting, OLAP analysis, data mining, dashboards and workflow capabilities. The only thing missing is an ETL (extract, transform and load) framework. This system will be built on the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and use J2EE servers and XML-based web services. The software already has a number of key components available as open-source projects. By adopting the Eclipse, Java, XML, and Web Services approach, Pentaho potentially positions itself well in terms of open standards at every stage -- input, processing and output. Interestingly, Pentaho has adopted Microsoft's MDX language for doing OLAP queries. The OLAP Council agreed to adopt this as a standard. However, Pentaho will find itself competing against free software from the top three database vendors.
See also: Eclipse BIRT Project

Justice Issues Fusion Center Guidelines
Alice Lipowicz, Washington Technology
The US Justice Department has released its first "Fusion Center Guidelines" making recommendations about the centers' law enforcement role, governance, connectivity standards, databases and security. The 125-page document, released August 23, 2005 was developed by the Office of Justice Program's Intelligence Fusion Center Focus Group, with representation from Justice, Homeland Security and FBI, and from state and local agencies. Additional fusion center guidance is expected in the coming weeks for public safety agencies and the private sector. Related to IT needs, the report specifically recommends use of the Global Justice Extensible Markup Language (XML) data model [GJXDM]. DHS this year adopted the Global Justice standard as the basis of its forthcoming National Information Exchange Model, expected in 2006. In addition, the report recommends the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard for messaging ratified by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), a standards organization. The Common Alerting Protocol provides a common standard for writing messages pertaining to emergency events and disasters. It was developed by a working group of emergency managers and industry IT experts, and has been endorsed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
See also: OASIS Emergency TC

Long Arm of the Law: Cross-Border Data Sharing
Alan Joch, Federal Computer Week
Homeland security officials have long known that their success depends on acting locally but thinking globally. Now, as they work to keep terrorists from crossing international borders, some law enforcement organizations are focusing global efforts on making it easier for information about crimes and criminals to flow from one country to the next. International collaboration for homeland security is happening to some degree, partially thanks to Extensible Markup Language (XML) standards tailored specifically for law enforcement. Law enforcement agencies throughout England, Wales and eventually Scotland are sharing information through the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which connects the computers and fingerprint scanning systems of nearly 50 police forces and agencies. It can compare more than 8 million fingerprints per second. One of the two keys to the U.K. system's data-sharing capabilities is the corporate data model PITO created for police services: the model standardizes the formatting of names, birth dates and other data elements. The second key is XML: "It's what gives everyone access to the data," said Rod Forry, program manager at Northrop Grumman IT, the systems integrator that helped launch the system. A frame-relay backbone -- soon to be replaced by Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networking -- provides the pipeline for distributing data to police departments, Forry said. Although XML was first adopted by commercial businesses in the 1990s, law enforcement IT managers worldwide soon embraced it as a tool for smoothing processes such as the distribution of police arrest reports to prosecutors or officers in other jurisdictions.
See also: US GJXDM

BEA's Plumtree Buy Adds Missing Piece to SOA Plan
Eric Knorr, InfoWorld
No company is more bullish on SOA than BEA. The problem is that BEA's WebLogic application server -- long the company's flagship product -- is really a Java platform, whereas an SOA is supposed to maintain platform neutrality. Hence BEA's platform-agnostic AquaLogic middleware, which shipped in early August, and BEA's surprise acquisition last week of Plumtree Software. Why Plumtree, the last of the independent enterprise portal vendors? At first glance it seems like an odd choice, given that BEA sells its own reasonably successful WebLogic Portal, which the company said it will continue to license as a separate product for the foreseeable future. Forrester analyst John Rymer, who follows the space closely, said Plumtree's portal will be "the UI" of BEA's AquaLogic suite, which includes an ESB (enterprise service bus), data integrator, application security manager, and service registry. Shane Pearson, vice president of product management at BEA, confirmed that Plumtree's portal will be part of AquaLogic. The Plumtree portal has made a point of avoiding platform lock-in. It runs on Java app servers and on Microsoft .Net. This degree of versatility dovetails nicely with the AquaLogic ESB, which is designed to be a lightweight, standards-based integration solution for SOA deployments. With the Plumtree portal, AquaLogic would gain a presentation layer and bragging rights as a fairly complete SOA solution.

IBM Readies Smoother BPM
Clint Boulton, InternetNews.com
IBM has put the finishing touches on software to improve the management of business processes in distributed computing environments. BPEL Tracking for Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance will provide customers with a one-window view of business processes, along with tools to locate problems within a claim or purchase order running on an application. The idea is to help customers save money and time using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach to business process management (BPM), according to an IBM statement. Big Blue sees SOAs as models that reuse assets such as code to help applications communicate and work together, often to conduct transactions or other tasks. In one scenario, an insurance company using the new software could view only claims processing, instead of monitoring several IT transactions and attempting to map them back to business functions. The tool will alert users to performance problems with the claim. Different processes have different performance, availability and response time, so the tool also sets policies to accommodate and monitor different jobs in a supply chain.
See also: BPEL references

Hollywood, Microsoft Align on New Windows
John Borland, CNET News.com
As Microsoft readies the next version of its Windows operating system, called Vista, the software giant is building in unprecedented levels of safeguards against video piracy. For the first time, the Windows operating system will wall off some audio and video processes almost completely from users and outside programmers, in hopes of making them harder for hackers to reach. The company is establishing digital security checks that could even shut off a computer's connections to some monitors or televisions if antipiracy procedures that stop high-quality video copying aren't in place. In short, the company is bending over backward -- and investing considerable technological resources -- to make sure Hollywood studios are happy with the next version of Windows, which is expected to ship on new PCs by late 2006. The protections may come with costs, including the risk of compatibility problems between some older monitors or TVs and Vista computers, particularly when trying to play high-quality video, and difficulty doing some casual copying, such as recording Internet audio. "There is a concern that there is a tendency to lock down parts of the design to protect the flanks of the copy-protection system," said Princeton University computer science professor Edward Felten, who has been an outspoken critic of rigid copy-protection rules. "That makes it harder for everyone, including Microsoft, to adapt to new uses."
See also: The DRMWatch article

Open-Source Projects Intertwine for Integration
Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com
Three open-source projects are teaming up to create an alternative to software-integration products from IBM and other heavyweights. The partnership calls for close technical ties and code sharing among ServiceMix, Apache Synapse and Celtix, which is hosted at France-based consortium ObjectWeb. The goal of the planned alliance, the sources said, is to create a more cohesive integration offering and attract software developers in the increasingly cluttered field of open source, where new projects seem to appear weekly. Wide adoption of open-source integration products -- software that glues together business applications -- could open up revenue opportunities for participants in the area of support. The three open-source efforts vying for more developer attention rely on standard protocols for integration. ServiceMix is server software, based on the Java Business Integration, or JBI, standard, which runs Java programs that collect and process data from different sources. Celtix, a project created by Iona Technologies, serves the same purpose but is designed to support a broad variety of communication protocols and languages. Meanwhile, Synapse is a recently launched project for processing XML documents when they are sent between two applications using the Simple Object Access Protocol, or SOAP.
See also: Synapse Initiative