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XML and Web Services In The News - 19 September 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by IBM Corporation
HEADLINES:
Amara XML Toolkit Version 1.1.9: Python Tools for XML Processing
Uche Ogbuji, Announcement
Amara XML Toolkit is a collection of Python tools for XML processing —
not just tools that happen to be written in Python, but tools built
from the ground up to use Python's conventions and take advantage of
the many advantages of the language. Amara builds on 4Suite, but
whereas 4Suite offers more on literal implementation of XML standards
in Python, Amara focuses on Pythonic idiom. It provides tools you can
trust to conform with XML standards without losing the familiar Python
feel. The components of Amara are: (1) Bindery: data binding tool — a
very Pythonic XML API' (2) Scimitar: implementation of the ISO
Schematron schema language for XML; converts Schematron files to Python
scripts; (3) domtools: set of tools to augment Python DOMs; (4) saxtools:
set of tools to make SAX easier to use in Python; (5) Flextyper:
user-defined datatypes in Python for XML processing. Changes since
Amara Version 1.1.7: (a) Add support for EasyInstall; other packaging
& installer improvements; (b) Add trimxml command line utility
(for running reports on XML files; (c) Switch to Docbook for
documentation source; (d) Bindery: Add support for dict-like accessors;
(e) Tenorsax: Restore support for PySax; (f) Scimitar: Implement abstract
rules; (g) Scimitar: Update Schematron namespace to ISO; (h) Scimitar:
Implement phases; (i) Scimitar: Support Schematron queryBinding
attribute: XPath, XSLT, EXSLT; (j) Add binderytools.fixup_namespaces
function; (k) Add binderytools.quick_xml_scan function; (l) Fix APIs
for adding comments and PIs; (m) Fix domtools.abs_path to be more
namespace aware; (n) Bug fixes...
See also: XML and Python
XML Comments Let You Build Documentation Directly From Your Visual Studio .NET Source Files
J. Andrew Schafer, MSDN Magazine
C# allows developers to embed XML comments into their source files --
a useful facility, especially when more than one programmer is working
on the same code. The C# parser can expand these XML tags to provide
additional information and export them to an external document for
further processing. This article shows how to use XML comments and
explains the relevant tags. The author demonstrates how to set up
your project to export your XML comments into convenient documentation
for the benefit of other developers. He also shows how to use comments
to generate help files. Although tools and utilities to extract comments
from source code have existed for quite some time, they have never
become widely used. Much of this can be attributed to the difficulty in
using these tools and the lack of integration with core development
products. XML-based comments in C# overcome these obstacles through
language and editor integration along with the use of XML technology.
Even more power can be realized by taking the extracted XML comment
data and transforming it to other desired data formats such as HTML.
See also: SGML/XML and Literate Programming
Handle Records, Rights and Long Tail Economies
John Erickson, D-Lib Magazine
Someone once said, "Metadata is the lifeblood of eCommerce...". eBay
works in part because its participants are willing to invest effort
to "wrap" their items in metadata: to virtually represent individual
goods and services by their metadata. That the eBay community buys
into this is a testament to the fact that eBay doesn't demand too much
of the participants; users must invest enough effort to convey the
essence of the product, but there isn't so much friction so as to
discourage their efforts and lose the opportunity. As a result, it has
been said that we can literally "find anything" on eBay. Except that
we can't, at least not niche rights for arbitrary pieces of content
that we might come across in our daily travels. We have yet to see a
web-based metadata aggregation service that enables users to easily
and arbitrarily bind metadata to an infrastructure-unique identifier.
What we need is a service that is in the infrastructure (and secure)
like the that provided by the DOI, as easy to use for creators as
TinyURLs, as easy to consume as RSS feeds, and that exposes web-based
APIs that are as easy to "mashup" with as Google's Search and Map APIs.
Perhaps what we are suggesting is a "Web 2.0" rebirth of the Handle
System that enables lightweight, secure, easy-to-use aggregations of
metadata in the infrastructure, or what I call Points in Space.
Develop SOA Solutions for Healthcare Organizations Using Business-Driven Development
Jean Wang, IBM developerWorks
The healthcare industry represents perhaps the most challenging industry
for IT solution implementation. This is due to the nature of the
healthcare industry's complicated business processes, sophisticated
medical data, heterogeneous components, and fragmented software systems.
The business of delivering quality medical services requires that
solutions be well aligned with the organization's business goals, and
that their IT systems are highly integrated and flexible to dynamic
business changes. A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) will generally
be a perfect way to meet these challenges. The question remains, however,
how does an organization realize the full adoption and deployment. This
article demonstrates how to use a business-driven development approach
to develop high-quality SOA solutions for integrating healthcare business
processes to achieve business goals with reduction on time and cost. It
will help business analysts, healthcare domain and subject matter experts,
line-of-business and project managers, and healthcare IT professionals
to realize their roles in an integrated and collaborated environment in
developing and implementing SOA solutions.
See also: XML in Clinical Research and Healthcare
Revised Civic Location Format for PIDF-LO
Martin Thomson and James Winterbottom, IETF Internet Draft
This document defines an XML format for the representation of civic
location. This format is designed for use with PIDF Location Object
(PIDF-LO) documents. The format is based on the civic address
definition in PIDF-LO, but adds several new elements based on the
civic types defined for DHCP, and adds a hierarchy to address complex
road identity schemes. The format also includes support for the
xml:lang language tag and restricts the types of elements where
appropriate. The XML schema defined for civic addresses allows for
the addition of the "xml:lang" attribute to all elements except
"country" and "PLC", which both contain enumerated values. It is
RECOMMENDED that each "civicAddress" element use one language only,
or a combination of languages that is consistent. Where a civic
location is represented in multiple languages multiple "civicAddress"
elements SHOULD be included in the PIDF-LO document. For civic
addresses that form a complex to describe the same location, these
SHOULD be inserted into the same tuple. The DHCP format for civic
addresses permits the inclusion of an element multiple times with
different languages or scripts. However, this XML form only permits
a single instance of each element. Multiple "civicAddress" elements
are required if any element is duplicated with different languages.
If the same language and script is used for all elements, or no
elements are duplicated, the format can be converted into a single
civic address. Where there are duplicated elements in different
languages, a "civicAddress" element is created for each language
that is present. All elements that are in that language are
included. Elements that are language independent, like the "country"
and "PLC" elements, are added to all "civicAddress" elements.
See also: IETF GEOPRIV WG Charter
IBM Launches Data Center Problem Toolkit
Staff, Computer Business Review Online
IBM Corporation is to release a tool that catalogs patterns of
suspicious events, or what it terms 'symptoms,' that might indicate a
looming data center outage. The ulterior goal is getting a web services
standard for providing a common format for symptoms reporting. Named
"The Build to Manage Toolkit for Problem Determination," the tool was
developed at IBM's autonomic computing research center in Yamato, Japan
in conjunction with its customer Toshiba. An Eclipse plug-in, the
toolkit is being designed to provide a catalog of event pattern
signatures, plus a software development kit for adding new signatures
to the catalog. In other words, if there are familiar patterns of system
events that occur before an outage or slowdown, why not catalog them
for quick reference? Development of the tool is an attempt by IBM to
prod the web services standards community to take the next step.
Currently, the community is in the midst of defining reconciled
standards for reporting system events via web services messages.
Specifically, it represents a coming together brokered by HP of the
Microsoft and DMTF-based WS-Management proposal with the IBM, BMC, and
CA-based WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) format approved by
OASIS. The group still has several drafts ahead of it to hash out
converged formats before finalizing a new proposal. So assuming that a
common event format is hammered out, IBM wants the web services
community to get around to standardizing how you report patterns of
events. IBM claims that its move to introduce technology ahead of talk
of any standards is not an attempt to preempt up the market with a de
facto standard.
SOA Practitioners' Guide
Staff, BEA Systems Technical Library
SOA is relatively new, so companies seeking to implement it cannot
tap into a wealth of practical expertise. Without a common language
and industry vocabulary based on shared experience, SOA may end up
adding more custom logic and increased complexity to IT infrastructure,
instead of delivering on its promise of intra and inter-enterprise
services reuse and process interoperability. To help develop a shared
language and collective body of knowledge about SOA, a group of SOA
practitioners created this SOA Practitioners' Guide series of documents.
In it, these SOA experts describe and document best practices and key
learnings relating to SOA, to help other companies address the
challenges of SOA. The SOA Practitioners' Guide is envisioned as a
multi-part collection of publications that can act as a standard
reference encyclopedia for all SOA stakeholders. (1) SOA Practitioners
Guide Part 1: Why Services-Oriented Architecture? This guide provides
a high-level summary of SOA. (2) SOA Practitioners Guide Part 2: This
guide covers the SOA Reference Architecture, which provides a worked
design of an enterprise-wide SOA implementation with detailed
architecture diagrams, component descriptions, detailed requirements,
design patterns, opinions about standards, patterns on regulation
compliance, standards templates and potential code assets from members.
(3) SOA Practitioners Guide Part 3: This guide introduces the Services
Lifecycle and provides a detailed process for services management
though the service lifecycle, from inception through to retirement or
repurposing of the services. It also contains an appendix that
includes organization and governance best practices, templates,
comments on key SOA standards, and recommended links for more
information.
New Eclipse IDE Eases Open Source SOA
Kathleen Richards, Application Development Trends
Open source platforms offer flexibility and faster time to production
if your team is adept at hand coding and working with command lines.
LogicBlaze, sponsors of an open source SOA distribution, released an
Eclipse-based development environment last week that is designed to do
some of the heavy lifting for you. LogicBlaze was founded in 2004 by
members of the Apache ActiveMQ project, which is a messaging platform
that is compliant with the JMS 1.1 specification. In 2004, LogicBlaze
released an open source Enterprise Service Bus called Apache ServiceMix.
The FUSE SOA platform includes what LogicBlaze says are best-of-breed
Apache components: the ESB, a messaging platform, persistence database,
service registry, management console and a BPEL orchestration engine.
All of the technologies are from the Apache Software Foundation and
available under the Apache 2.0 license. Like many commercial SOA suites,
the technologies are packaged, tested, pre-validated for
interoperability, and downloadable — in this case, as an open source
distribution--with a single installer, and at runtime, a single point
of control. The FUSE 1.0 platform was released in March 2006. FUSE 1.2
became available in July, a key part of the update is the introduction
of the FUSE IDE. The new FUSE Development Environment, announced last
week at EclipseWorld, is based on the Eclipse Web Tools Platform. It
offers an Eclipse-based graphical user interface for the FUSE platform
and other toolsets to help users configure, integrate, debug, and
manage SOA components using standard interfaces such as JBI. Users will
be able to model and implement BPEL business process orchestration
using an Apache Ode engine. That functionality is expected in the
Enterprise Edition, available in October.
Freely Available ISO Standards for BPX and Developers
Gunther Stuhec, SAP Blog
Most of the ISO standards are copyrighted and ISO charges for the most
copies. It is possible to purchase it direclty by ISO or even the
related national standardization body, like DIN (German Standardization
Institute). The charge depends mostly on the pages or even size of the
standard. It is approximately 100 Swiss Francs per copy. However, in
accordance with ISO/IEC JTC 1 and the ISO and IEC Councils are a number
of standards freely available, which can be used for standardization
purposes. You'll find these freely available standard: (A) Freely
Available Standards provided by ISO, and (B) Freely Standards Download
provided by ANSI (American National Standards Institute). The Business
Process Expert (BPX) has the opportunity to get freely available ISO
standards, in where some of the playing a key part in reference models
and open distributed processing. Some of these ISO standards are:
(1) ISO/IEC 7498 - Open Systems Interconnection — Basic Reference Model;
(2) ISO/IEC 8613 - Open Document Architecture (ODA) and Interchange
Format; (3) ISO/IEC 8824 - Abstract Syntax Notification (ASN.1);
(4) ISO/IEC 9075 - Data Base Langauges - SQL; (5) ISO/IEC 10032 -
Reference Model of Data Management; (6) ISO/IEC 10746 - Open Distributed
Processing; (7) ISO/IEC 11179 - Metadata Registries (MDR); (8) ISO/IEC
14662 - Open-edi reference model; (9) ISO/IEC 14977 - Syntactic
metalanguage; (10) ISO/IEC 15504 - Software Engineering - Process
assessment; (11) ISO/IEC 15944 - Business agreement semantic descriptive
techniques; (12) ISO/IEC 24824 - Generic applications of ASN.1: Fast
Web Services. In other words: If you need a copy of a specific ISO
standard, please have a look to the provided websites, before you'll
buy one. If you don't find the requested standard, please inform the
ECO International Standards group, before you buy a copy.
See also: the site
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