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XML and Web Services In The News - 31 August 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Sun Microsystems
HEADLINES:
Industry Partners Publish Web Services Resource Transfer (WS-RT)
HP, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Initial Industry Draft Specification
Hewlett-Packard Development Company (HP), Intel Corporation,
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), and Microsoft
Corporation have released Version 1.0 of "Web Services Resource
Transfer." The specification is described as "the first of single set
of specifications for resource access/manipulation, events and
management. The specification defines extensions to WS-Transfer. While
its initial design focuses on management resource access its use is
not necessarily limited to those situations. WS-RT is one of the (WS-*)
Web service specifications, designed to be composed with each other
to provide a rich set of tools for the Web services environment... The
operations described in the WS-ResourceTransfer (WS-RT) specification
constitute an extension to the WS-Transfer specification, which defines
standard messages for controlling resources using the familiar
paradigms of "get", "put", "create", and "delete". The extensions deal
primarily with fragment-based access to resources to satisfy the common
requirements of WS-ResourceFramework and WS-Management. specification
intends to meet the following requirements: (1) Define a standardized
technique for accessing resources using semantics familiar to those in
the system management domain: get, put, create and delete; (2) Define
WSDL 1.1 portTypes, for the Web service methods described in the
specification, compliant with WS-I Basic Profile 1.1; (3) Define minimum
requirements for compliance without constraining richer implementations;
(4) Compose with other Web service specifications for secure, reliable,
transacted message delivery; (5) Provide extensibility for more
sophisticated and/or currently unanticipated scenarios; (6) Support a
variety of encoding formats including (but not limited to) both SOAP 1.1
and SOAP 1.2 Envelopes...
See also: WS-ResourceTransfer
WSDM/WS-Man Reconciliation: An Overview and Migration Guide
IBM Corporation, [IBM, HP, Intel and Microsoft Roadmap Document]
Version 1.0 (August 2006) of a "WSDM/WS-Man Reconciliation" document
has been published. "On March 15, 2006, HP, Intel, IBM and Microsoft
announced the intention to reconcile the WSDM and WS-Man specifications
into a single standard for management of system resources using Web
services. As the work reaches certain milestones, portions of it will
be shared with the Web service community to solicit feedback. This
document summarizes the first of these milestones: the publication of
a first draft of Web Services Resource Transfer (WS-RT) specification,
the publication of the Service Modeling Language specification and an
update to the WS-Metadata Exchange (WS-MEX) specification. Both WSDM
and WS-Man profile the use of lower-level specifications for use in
the management domain, so the reconciliation of these two management
specifications can not happen without first reconciling the
infrastructural specifications each are built upon. One of the key
components in this is the ability to access and manipulate resources.
WSDM uses the OASIS family of specifications known as WS-Resource
Framework, while WS-Man uses WS-Transfer for this purpose. The
reconciliation work merged these two to produce a new specification
called WS-Resource Transfer. WS-RT introduces features that will
leverage the extension points in WS-Transfer to allow for a more
optimal use in not only the management domain but general purpose
resource manipulation as well."
See also: the overview
RESTful Web Services
Sameer Tyagi, Sun Developer Network (SDN) Article
In software engineering, the term software architectural style
generally refers to "a set of design rules that identify the kinds of
components and connectors that may be used to compose a system or
subsystem." Some common examples of architectural styles include the
Pipe and Filter, Layered, Push Based, and so on. In the web services
world, REpresentational State Transfer (REST) is a key design idiom
that embraces a stateless client-server architecture in which the web
services are viewed as resources and can be identified by their URLs.
Web service clients that want to use these resources access a
particular representation by transferring application content using a
small globally defined set of remote methods that describe the action
to be performed on the resource. REST is an analytical description of
the existing web architecture, and thus the interplay between the style
and the underlying HTTP protocol appears seamless. The HTTP methods
such as GET and POST are the verbs that the developer can use to
describe the necessary create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) actions
to be performed. Some may see an analogy to operations in SQL, which
also relies on a few common verbs. However, the REST style and HTTP
protocol are mutually exclusive, and REST does not require HTTP.
JAX-WS provides comprehensive support for building web services.
Developers can leverage the capabilities of this API to build and
consume a variety of web services, whether those services are based
on WSDL or are RESTful in behavior. The combination of the Provider
and Dispatch interfaces allows web services to be built and consumed,
and it provides developers with the flexibility to process the messages
sent over the wire in a variety of ways. In addition, the future holds
the possibility of describing RESTful web services for tools to
consume, which will further simplify the developer's experience.
A Grid Is a Grid Is a Grid...
Jon Erickson, DDJ Blog
It hasn't been that long ago that a "Grid computer" was a high-end
($8000-$10,000) laptop, best known for its semi-ruggadized matt-black
magnesium case. Okay, maybe it was that long ago, the early 1980s.
Still, you could make a credible argument that the Grid was, in fact,
the first laptop computer. Moreover, in the spirit of what-goes-around-
comes-around, it had features that we're seeing again today. For
instance, the Grid didn't have a disk drive, but used 384 KB
non-volatile bubble memory. Software could be loaded from a server
and external floppy or hard disks. These days, of course, a "grid
computer" means something altogether different. Grid computing is a
computing model that's based on multiple networked computers that
model a virtual computer architecture that distributes execution
across a parallel infrastructure. The smaller companies that are
starting to make grid computing really interesting. ActiveGrid, for
instance, is mixing up grids with Web 2.0, producing tools that let
you accelerate Web 2.0 development. Likewise, Digipede Technologies
is providing grid computing solutions on the Microsoft .NET platform.
Finally, a new version of the freely available Access Grid Toolkit,
developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Lab,
has just been released. The Access Grid Toolkit is software that
uses audio, video, data and text to enable distributed researchers
to work together as if they were at the same location.
Atom Tool: The Ape
Tim Bray, Ongoing Blog
I've put up an Atom Protocol Exerciser at www.tbray.org/ape which
might evolve to become a sanity-checking tool something along the lines
of the Feed Validator. I don't want to call it a 'validator' because a
feed can be said unambiguously to be valid, or not; but a publishing-
system interface might be unusably buggy or slow or have moronic
authentication policies. All the Exerciser (let's just say 'the Ape'
for short) does is perform a bunch of operations that a typical APP
client might, and report the results. Also I've taken liberties in
reporting some things that aren't covered by the spec that implementors
might want to know about. One of the most useful things the Ape does
is provide a complete trace of exactly what the client and server sent
back and forth to each other; immensely helpful as a debugging aid.
Quite a few interesting war stories have been coming out of the
Ape-building process. I'll keep this post updated with the current Ape
status. The Ape has one required argument, the service document URI.
Optionally, you can provide a username/password pair (Basic and
Basic+TLS work at the moment) and the names of collections you want
Ape to use for posting new entries and media files...
See also: Atom references
Traceroute Measurements Information Model and XML Data Model
Saverio Niccolini et al. (eds), IETF Internet Draft
Members of the IETF IP Performance Metrics (IPPM) Working Group have
released a version -01 draft of for "Traceroute Measurements
Information Model and XML Data Model." The draft describes a standard
way to store traceroute measurements. To better address the traceroute
measurements storing issue, the authors first of all give a definition
of the traceroute tool, describe the tool itself as well as its
parameters and the default values on the most common operating systems
and the output results that can be stored. Data Model for Storing
Traceroute Measurements: For textual representations, using the
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is an obvious choice. XML supports
clean structuring of data and syntax checking of records. With some
limitations it is human readable. It is supported well by a huge pool
of tools and standards for generating, transmitting, parsing and
converting it to other data formats. Its disadvantages is the resource
comsumption for processing, storing, and transmitting information.
Since the expected data volumes of traceroute data in network operation
and maintenance is not expected to be extremly high, the inefficient
usage of resources is not a significant disadvantage. Therefore, XML was
chosen as basis for the traceroute information model that is specified
in this section. Document Section 7 presents the XML schema to be used
as a template for storing and/or exchanging traceroute measurements. The
schema was designed in order to use an extensible approach based on
templates (pretty similar to how IPFIX protocol is designed) where the
traceroute configuration elements (both the requested parameters,
traceRouteRequest, and the actual parameters used,
traceRouteMeasurementMetadata) are metadata to be referenced by results
information elements (data) by means of the traceRouteTestName element
(used as unique identifier). Currently Global Grid Forum (GGF) is also
using this approach and cross- requirements have been analyzed as well
as standardization opportunities of a joint work. The document uses URNs
to describe an XML namespace and an XML schema for traceroute
measurements conforming to a registry mechanism described in RFC 3688;
two URI assignments are requested.
Mozilla Updates Firefox 2.0 Browser Beta
Robert McMillan, InfoWorld
Mozilla has released a new test version of Firefox 2.0, which will be
the next major version of its popular open-source browser. Firefox 2.0
Beta 2 features an improved user interface and a limited version of
the phishing protection feature that Mozilla is developing for the
browser. Beta 2 also comes with improved search capabilities, a
spellchecker for Web forms, and jazzed-up tabbed browsing capabilities.
This second beta release will probably be the last beta version of
Firefox 2.0. Developers are now planning to ship a nearly final "release
candidate" edition of the browser on September 19, 2006 with the
finished product going out the door by the end of October [2006]. Both
Mozilla and Microsoft are rushing to finish major updates to their
browser software. Late last week Microsoft posted the first release-
candidate version of Internet Explorer 7, and it is expecting to ship
the final version of the next-generation browser by year's end. The
release candidate can be found here. Research company OneStat.com
estimates that about 13 percent of Web surfers now use Firefox. The
Netherlands-based company pegs IE users at 83 percent.
Report: Use ODF, Save 550 Million
John Goetze, Blog
The Danish debates about open standards continues. Over at Ingenioren,
we are covering the development extensively and continuously, but only
in Danish. The story is about the so-called Ramboll-report, which is a
report about the costs related to switching to open standards for
document formats in the Danish government. The report is made by Ramboll
Management, a Danish consultancy, on behalf of The Danish Open Source
Business Association (OSL). The Open Source Business Association
estimates that the whole of government (including local government)
could save 550 million kroner by migrating to OpenOffice.org and ODF.
That's around 94 million US Dollars. Quite a lot of money for a small
country like Denmark. There are no official comments from Government.
Last week, a governmental committee published a report about
interoperability. That report recommended a number of initiatives, but
was also criticised for being indecisive on many issues, for example
those related to document formats. The Parliament Order states that
government must use open standards, and sets January 1, 2008 as a
deadline for the implementation. "It's hardly time to be indecisive
now," as Morten Helveg commented.
See also: ODF references
ODF Open Source Projects
Bob Sutor, Bob Sutor's Open Blog
Some colleagues and I were talking this morning and someone asked what
open source ODF projects were going on at SourceForge. So we decided
to take a look. The [searches and lists presented] will change over
time, and the SourceForge list, in particular, will increase once our
ODF/accessibility contest gets into Phase 2. In the meanwhile, links
to a few of the ones that intrigued me: docvert, perlodfconv, AODL,
OpenDocumentPHP, Opyo (Python!), ODF Add-in for Microsoft Word (this
is the one that Microsoft is sponsoring), odfgrep, and pdf2oo. There
are others. There are other open source projects involving ODF as well.
OpenOffice comes immediately to mind. You should also take a look at
the list of applications at the OpenDocument Fellowship. Many of
those are open source. Incidentally, the OpenDocument Fellowship
website is looking really good these days...
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