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XML and Web Services In The News - 11 September 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by BEA Systems
HEADLINES:
W3C Announces WebCGM 2.0 As a Candidate Recommendation
Benoit Bezaire, David Cruikshank, Lofton Henderson, W3C CR
Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) is an ISO standard, defined by ISO/IEC
8632:1999, for the interchange of 2D vector and mixed vector/raster
graphics. WebCGM is a profile of CGM, which adds Web linking and is
optimized for Web applications in technical illustration, electronic
documentation, geophysical data visualization, and similar fields. First
published (1.0) in 1999 and followed by a second (errata) release in
2001, WebCGM unifies potentially diverse approaches to CGM utilization
in Web document applications. It therefore represents a significant
interoperability agreement amongst major users and implementers of the
ISO CGM standard. WebCGM 2.0 adds a DOM (API) specification for
programmatic access to WebCGM objects, and a specification of an XML
Companion File (XCF) architecture, for externalization of non-graphical
metadata. WebCGM 2.0, in addition, builds upon and extends the graphical
and intelligent content of WebCGM 1.0, delivering functionality that
was forecast for WebCGM 1.0, but was postponed in order to get the
standard and its implementations to users expeditiously. The design
criteria for WebCGM aim at a balance between graphical expressive power
on the one hand, and simplicity and implementability on the other. A
small but powerful set of standardized metadata elements supports the
functionalities of hyperlinking and document navigation, picture
structuring and layering, and enabling search and query of WebCGM
picture content.
See also: WebCGM Working Group
WSDM Web Services Specification Approved
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
OASIS has announced approval of the Web Services Distributed Management
(WSDM) version 1.1 specification as an OASIS Standard. Proponents are
billing the ratification as a boon to SOA. The status bestowed by OASIS
signifies the organization's highest level of ratification. WSDM enables
management applications to be built using Web services and allows
resources to be controlled by many managers through a single interface,
OASIS said. Version 1.1 integrates standard versions of dependent
specifications WS-Addressing, WS-Resource Framework and WS-Notification.
WSDM itself consists of two specifications: Management Using Web Services
(MUWS), which defines how to represent and access manageability
interfaces of resources as Web services, and Management of Web Services
(MOWS), which defines how to manage Web services as resources and how
to describe and access that manageability via MUWS. Companies including
as BMC Software, CA, Hitachi, SOA Software and Tibco are endorsing
WSDM 1.1. Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS, stated, "WSDM
provides a much-needed method for enabling manageable Web services
applications to interoperate across enterprise and organizational
boundaries." He congratulated OASIS WSDM Technical Committee members
for their commitment to collaborating on this solution.
See also: the OASIS announcement
Best Practices for Applying AJAX to JSR 168 Portlets
Greg Ziebold and Marina Sum, Sun Developer Network
A year ago, the article "Asynchronous Rendering of Portlet Content
With AJAX Technology" demonstrated how to apply Asynchronous JavaScript
and XML (AJAX) to portlets. Since then, AJAX has become increasingly
popular in the software arena and many new AJAX technologies have
emerged. Examples are JavaScript libraries and toolkits, such as the
Dojo Toolkit, the Yahoo! UI Library, the Google Web Toolkit,
Script.aculo.us, and DHTML Goodies. In addition, new standards bodies
like Open AJAX and the Dojo Foundation are key players. In light of the
many developments in the past year and the host of feedback on how to
use AJAX in portlets, this article describes several helpful tips and
practices on how best to exploit AJAX in portlets that comply with the
Java Specification Request (JSR) 168: Portlet Specification. This
article refers to an updated version of the sample, AJAX Portlet Invoice
Viewer, from the original article. You can download the binary Web
archive (WAR) file. In the near future, this sample will reside in the
Open Source Portlet Repository on java.net. Indisputably, limitations
and caveats exist in programming AJAX with respect to JSR 168 portlets.
But should that preclude you from taking advantage of this exciting new
technology? Until JSR 286 is available, bear in mind the best practices
and guidelines described in this article when applying AJAX and the
associated JavaScript libraries to portlets.
Implement Two-Way Communication Among ESB Components
E.V.Mohan Vamsi, Java World
The Java Business Integration specification (JBI) defines a standard
for building system integration applications using Web Services
Description Language (WSDL) and XML-based messaging. JBI therefore aims
to standardize the business-to-business integration space that was,
until JBI, served by non-standardized products. Now, clients can use a
JBI-compliant enterprise service bus (ESB) built by a vendor as a
bundle of services that can integrate seamlessly with other services
(even if developed by other vendors), as long as they adhere to the JBI
specification — an impossibility before the JBI. The JBI specification
also specifies three other message exchange patterns: In-Only, Robust
In-Only, and In-Optional-Out. Each of these patterns has usage scenarios
based on the reliability requirements of the message exchange. The
role of consumer and producer components also varies based on the MEP
chosen for communication. In this article, the author looks at how
component-to-component interactions happen in a JBI-compliant way over
an ESB, using the Loan Broker example bundled with the open source ESB
ServiceMix.
IBM Prepares Open-Source Systems Management Initiative for Eclipse
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
IBM and other parties are set to propose an open source systems
management initiative for consideration by the Eclipse Foundation,
with managing SOA a goal of the plan, an IBM official said at the
EclipseWorld 2006 conference on Friday. Tentatively referred to as
COSMOS (Community-driven Systems Management in Open Source), the
effort is to be proposed as an Eclipse top-level project centered on
systems management tools. Resource modeling also is part of COSMOS.
Enabling management of SOA and other environments is an intention of
COSMOS, Weitzel said. He did not have a specific date on when COSMOS
would officially be proposed to Eclipse. Principal focuses of COSMOS
include: data collection and a server component, monitoring of the
user interface, resource modeling and deployment. Resource
instrumentation also is a critical component, with industry
specifications including WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management),
JMX (Java Management Extensions) and the Open Group's ARM (Application
Resource Measuremen) standard all factored into COSMOS. Other projects
also may play a role in COSMOS, such as the Eclipse Corona application
lifecycle management project and the Eclipse Test & Performance Tools
Platform... LogicBlaze this week announced availability of its
LogicBlaze Fuse Development Environment, based on the Eclipse Web Tools
Platform. Key features of the environment include a configuration and
deployment control, including an Apache Maven-based object model to
manage configuration of integration components; automatic code
generation through Maven and full Eclipse debugging. Maven is an open
source project management and software build tool. BPEL (Business
Process Execution Language for Web services) orchestration also is
supported, via implementation of the Apache Ode engine.
See also: Atom references
Sun Brings JRuby In-House
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
Sun Microsystems has hired the lead developers on the JRuby project, an
open-source project aimed at developing an implementation of the Ruby
language on the Java Virtual Machine. Rich Green, Executive Vice
President of software at Sun, announced that Charles Nutter and Thomas
Enebo, the chief maintainers of JRuby, will become Sun employees this
month. They will be working full time on JRuby "and in particular paying
attention to developer tools," a Sun spokeswoman said. Meanwhile, in a
statement, Sun said: "Sun believes the Java platform is bigger than just
the Java language, and we support giving developers a choice. Sun is
planning to support multiple languages on the Java platform; plus,
we'll be working toward interoperability between the Java platform and
other languages." In a blog post about the hire, Tim Bray, director of
Web technologies at Sun, addressed what he believed would be commonly
asked questions about Sun bringing the two developers aboard. As to why
Sun hired them: "First, they are excellent developers. Technologies
like Ruby are getting intense interest from the developer community,
and Sun is interested in anything that developers care about." And from
Bray's description, it sounds like Nutter and Enebo will be doing for
Sun with Ruby what Jim Hugunin has done for Microsoft with Python:
"They have to get JRuby to 1.0 and make sure that the major applications
are running smoothly and are performant... Dynamically-typed languages
like Ruby are only beginning to be accepted in the software mainstream,
and many of the best practices and tools remain to be invented. Second,
we'd like to ensure that the Ruby programming language, in its JRuby
form, is available to the community of Java developers. Finally, there
is a possibility that the Java platform may prove to be an attractive
deployment option for existing Ruby applications in certain scenarios."
See also: InfoWorld
BEA Delivers Tuxedo SOA Technology
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
BEA Systems has completed development of BEA Services Architecture
Leveraging Tuxedo 1.1, a solution for making applications that use
BEA's Tuxedo run more efficiently on service-oriented architectures.
Officials at BEA, in San Jose, Calif., said BEA SALT 1.1 is based on
a configuration-driven model that presents existing Tuxedo services
as Web services with no coding needed. BEA SALT complies with Web
services specifications such as WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Addressing,
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1, SOAP 1.2, and Web Services
Description Language (WSDL) 1.1, which enables the BEA SALT technology
to interoperate with other Web service products and development
toolkits. The company said BEA SALT 1.1 provides SOA-enabling
technology for large vertical applications in industries such as
financial services, insurance, manufacturing, retail and government.
The technology is available for download from BEA and the company is
expected to officially announce BEA SALT 1.1 later in September.
I Column Like I CM: XML, CMS, and DITA
Bob Doyle, EContentMag.com
In a recent review of XML editing tools, I looked particularly at their
support for DITA, especially integration of the DITA Open Toolkit (OT).
The DITA OT is a reference implementation of the OASIS specification for
"ready-made metadata" in the DITA DTDs and Schemas. Why is the DITA OT
important and likely to affect your choice of a CMS in the near future.
What Astoria and other XML CMS vendors are doing is putting an
attractive, highly usable, interactive, and soon completely web-based
interface on the Open Toolkit. They are fully integrating DITA into
their menus. They are also moving OT processing away from the desktop
to fast remote servers. The author/editor opens a project, typically
seeing a DITA Map, a sort of virtual table of contents look into the
content. Suzanne Mescan of Vasont says they connect DITA Maps and the
DITA collections (Tasks, Concepts, References, and Topics) with
bi-directional links, allowing users to simply drag-and-drop content to
build new documents. When the writer clicks to publish to the Open
Toolkit, dialog boxes ask for the desired publication channels for
output: Help, HTML, PDF. They also ask for the destinations for the
different results. Should files go back to the main repository, be sent
via ftp to web servers, and so forth. At this point, says Debra Boczulak,
product manager at XyEnterprise, a contributing tech writer can step
away, the entire publication process controlled by a master
configuration file, with editors notified, etc. Or a sophisticated
hands-on manager can watch interactive reports while the OT builds the
publications, dealing with any warnings or error messages on the fly.
A complete audit trail logs the process for later analysis.
See also: the XML.org DITA Focus Area
Merge XML and Java with XMLBeans in Commerce
Kunal Mittal and Grace Walker, IBM developerWorks
In the SOA paradigm, providers and consumers communicate through
messages. The messaging interface must be platform- and language-
independent. Therefore, messages are often constructed using XML
documents that conform to XML schema. Of course, application data is
frequently stored in XML format as well. XML provides a basic syntax
that you can use to share information between different kinds of
computers, different applications, and different organizations without
needing to pass through many layers of conversion. XML is important
because it supports the enterprise application integration effort by
providing a common, standardized platform upon which to build an
integration infrastructure. XMLBeans allows you to use Java programming
language with XML. Java programming language is an object-oriented
language based on open, public standards. It's portable, robust and
reliable. Because of these characteristics, it has been widely
accepted and implemented in many industries, including entertainment.
However, XML is not compatible with the Java programming language.
XMLBeans is the best option for overcoming this impediment. XMLBeans
is used for XML data binding. XMLBeans lets Java applications take
complete advantage of XML. XMLBeans uses XML Schema to compile Java
interfaces and classes that you can use to access and modify XML
instance data. Using this technology, you can compile an XML Schema
into a set of Java classes that can: (1) Use XMLBeans for all of the
schemas encountered; (2) Access the XML data at whatever level is
required. The XMLBeans compiler generates an object representation
of an XML schema. This object representation is a set of generic Java
classes and interfaces that represent the structure and constraints
of the schema.
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