XML and Web Services In The News - 09 September 2005

September 10: Software Freedom Day 2005
Boni David, Software Freedom International News
To be celebrated worldwide on September 10, 2005, Software Freedom Day "is a global, grassroots effort to educate the public about the virtues and availability of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Over 200 teams have registered, and they have plans to celebrate Free Software at schools, universities, parks, and many other public places. Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of (FOSS) desicated to the education of the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business. An official motion in the Scottish Parliament congratulates the orrganisers of Software Freedom Day for working to highlight the Free and Open Source Software movement. It notes that a Software Freedom Day event will take place in Edinburgh on Saturday 10-September-2005 at which members of the public will be able to try free and open source software such as Ubuntu, OpenOffice, and Firefox for themselves. The motion recognises the benefits which could exist for the public sector in making greater use of such products, and that free and open source software is founded on principles with important political concepts which have the potential for application to other areas of society and the economy."
See also: TheOpenCD FOSS

FERA-based SOA Information Model, Run-Time SOA, and SOA Collaboration Semantics
Semantion, Inc., Technical Contribution
Semantion Inc. has contributed its FERA-based SOA specification documents to the OASIS Electronic Business Service Oriented Architecture (ebSOA) TC. According to the posting, the Federated Enterprise Reference Architecture (FERA) specification includes three documents: [1] Run-time Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) V0.1, [2] Service Oriented Architecture Information Model (SOA IM) V0.1, and [3] Service Oriented Architecture Collaboration Semantics (SOA CS) V0.1. SOA IM can be stored in a standard registry like OASIS ebXML Registry or OASIS UDDI and used to provide informational support for both context and content related to any business process. The SOA IM is presented in a form of an open standard-based XML document referred to as the Collaborative Process Information Document (CPID) that can be either created manually or generated from a business process definition using a visual modeling tool. Three main principles of this SOA architecture are: completeness, open standards-based, and standards convergence. The SOA components are based on open standards with the exception of the agent framework and business rules, as there are no adequate agent framework or business rules standards available today that are conforming to all SOA requirements. The main components of the FERA reference architecture are: federates, interfaces, and SOA Federation. Each participant involved in the collaboration is called a federate (systems or people).
See also: OASIS ebSOA TC

Health IT Standards Body in the Offing
Mary Mosquera, Government Computer News
[U.S.] Health and Human Services secretary Michael Leavitt this week will name the members of the public/private organization that will set standards to enable the exchange of health care data; he will select seventeen (17) members from federal and state government and from industry, including health care providers, insurers and IT vendors, to form the American Health Information Community. AHIC also will choose the use cases for which standards will be implemented. Leavitt suggested electronic prescribing and bio-surveillance as early use cases. The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina has heightened the need for bio- and pandemic surveillance and interoperability standards to allow sharing of data, for example, from emergency rooms. Interoperability will jump-start a market and spur adoption of such health IT systems as electronic health records. Katrina destroyed the paper medical records of thousands of New Orleans evacuees, many of whom are ill and no longer have medications... In addition to AHIC, HHS will be awarding contracts over the next several weeks to develop a process for standards harmonization, health IT product accreditation organization, prototypes for health IT architecture and assessing variations in state privacy rules.
See also: XML in Clinical Research and Healthcare

Adobe Extends Smarts to PDFs
Kathleen Ohlson, Application Development Trends
Adobe Systems recently bulked up its LiveCycle server platform, providing a graphical interface for assembling business flows, components-based building blocks for analyzing business processes, and an enhanced process management server. LiveCycle incorporates server applications including Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions, which enable commenting or form-filling on a per-document basis. The new Adobe LiveCycle Workflow creates and distributes interactive documents and forms that can be filled out, routed and secured according to a business's defined rules and policies. Businesses can apply digital signatures to Adobe PDF files, publish certified documents and add controls that define who can open, view, print and copy documents. They also can apply these controls at different points in the workflow. The server uses Web services protocols and XML to connect to other systems. The upgrade also uses operations performance and other technology from Adobe partners, such as Avoka, Corticon, ILOG, iGrafx and NetManage. LiveCycle runs on BEA Systems' WebLogic, IBM WebSphere and JBoss, and supports AIX, Windows and Solaris; support for Red Hat Linux and Novell SUSE Linux platforms is planned. LiveCycle provides Java APIs, uses XML for data interchange, and supports Web services, allowing for easy integration into existing enterprise infrastructures.
See also: The LiveCycle Dev Center

Specifying Recursion Depth: Atom Link No Follow
James M. Snell, IETF Internet Draft
An initial individual IETF Internet Draft has been published for "Atom Link No Follow," presenting a mechanism that allows Atom feed publishers to express preferences for how an Atom consumer should processe Atom links and Content-By-Reference. It thus conveys information to applications consuming Atom documents how they should handle links and referenced content contained within the feed. For example, a publisher may include an enclosure link within a feed but may not wish for applications to automatically download the enclosed file when it processes the feed; or, the publisher may not wish to allow applications to archive or index the enclosure in any way. The 'follow', 'index' and 'archive' attributes introduced herein provide the means for publishers to express these preferences. The 'x:follow" attribute indicates whether applications should automatically attempt to follow links and referenced content (e.g., boolean, whether or not enclosure links should be automatically downloaded, etc). A value of "no" indicates that applications should not attempt to automatically resolve the referenced resource -- rather, the application should wait until a user explicitly requests the resource to be resolved. The 'x:index' attribute indicates whether applications should index links and referenced content. The 'x:archive' attribute indicates whether applications should archive the targets of links and content references.
See also: Atom Publishing Format and Protocol

Why Google Hired Vint Cerf
Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com
What will Internet visionary Vint Cerf do for Google? Whether he meant to or not, Cerf hinted at one area he was interested in six weeks before he joined the search giant, and it deals with a wireless device near you. Cerf is the man who co-developed the basic communications protocol of the Internet. In a broad-ranging interview with CNET News.com, Cerf said databases filled with geographically indexed material will soon help people easily retrieve lists of local hospitals, ATMs or cafes on mobile devices. Advertisements could also be part of the mix. Cerf mused: "This ability to turn geographically indexed data into useful, possibly life-saving, and potentially (money-making) data is extremely exciting." Google is expecting big things from Kai-Fu Lee. But first, the company has to duke it in court with Microsoft. The search giant is already on its way to doing that with Google Earth, a three- dimensional mapping service, still in its testing phase, that lets people find services like restaurants and ATMs by ZIP code. But Google has yet to make the service as robust as Cerf described. And it's limited to PCs.

Microsoft Targets Google with Developer Platform
Elizabeth Montalbano, InfoWorld
Next week Microsoft will try to gain ground on competitors Google and Yahoo by unveiling a new Web development platform on which developers can add new search, mapping and instant-messaging features to online products from the MSN division. The set of APIs will be announced at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Analyst surveys put Microsoft a distant third behind Google and Yahoo in the Web search market, and the MSN business unit has been working intently and releasing new Web-based products and services to catch up to those companies. Google, in particular, has been in Microsoft's sights with its online search, mapping and other services. A recent MSN release in this area was a beta of Virtual Earth, a new mapping tool similar to Google Maps. Both Virtual Earth and Google Maps allow users to find locations or businesses by address and other search criteria, and both use both street-map and satellite-map views. Microsoft also made a major revamp of its MSN Search engine last June in an effort to take on the Mountain View, California, search giant, but the tool has not yet caught on widely with users. The MSN APIs that Microsoft will open for developers include the MSN Search Web Services API, which gives developers access to functionality for Web site content search results, local attractions, maps and directions, digital satellite images and other information. Microsoft also will open an API for its MSN Virtual Earth beta that enables third-party companies to build commercial applications using the tool.

Processing XML with Xerces and the DOM
Ethan McCallum, O'Reilly ONLamp.com
From data storage to data exchange and from Perl to Java, it's rare to write software these days and not bump into XML. Adding XML capabilities to a C++ application, though, usually involves coding around a C-based API. Even the cleanest C API takes some work to wrap in C++, often leaving you to choose between writing your own wrappers (which eats up time) or using third-party wrappers, which means one more dependency. Adopt the Xerces-C++ parser and you can skip these middlemen. This mature, robust toolkit is portable C++ and is available under the flexible Apache Software License (version 2.0). Xerces' benefits extend beyond its C++ roots. It gives you a choice of SAX and DOM parsers, and supports XML namespaces. It also provides validation by DTD and XML schema, as well as grammar caching for improved performance. This article uses the context of loading, modifying, and storing an XML config file to demonstrate Xerces-C++'s DOM side. The Document Object Model (DOM) is a specification for XML parsing designed with portability in mind. That is, whether you're using Perl or Java or C++, the high-level DOM concepts are the same. This eases the learning curve when moving between DOM toolkits.
See also: Document Object Model (DOM)

Hammerhead Enables Service Oriented Architecture with XML/SOAP
Staff, Converge! Network Digest
Hammerhead Systems has introduced an enhanced EMS capability based on XML/SOAP that enables its HSX 6000 Layer 2.5 aggregation platform to support up to a thousand different service profiles on a single port, including VoIP, IP Video, Internet, email and business services, while supporting up to a million flows per system. Each of these profiles can be "pre-engineered" onto the network, enabling virtually instant provisioning of new services using automated tools. Hammerhead's new Pegador SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) supports the TeleManagement Forum 854 XML/SOAP Interface, which is a loosely coupled Internet-based framework mandated by large service providers. SOA will enable service providers to address the operational challenges in the deployment of higher value services and facilitate the development of web-based services and customer network management offerings. This could include the integration of business systems to management systems for reliable billing, web applications for transaction processing as well as integration to supplier and partners for purchase order fulfillment and order tracking, and service revenue opportunities for the enterprise in verticals such as the financial, retail, manufacturing or transportation sectors.