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XML and Web Services In The News - 20 September 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by IBM Corporation
HEADLINES:
BEA, HP Tout SOA Capabilities With Repository, Services
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
In separate SOA-related announcements this week, BEA Systems is
upgrading its repository while HP is adding to its roster of "SOA
Competency Centers." BEA is introducing a BEA-branded version of the
former Flashline repository, gearing it to SOA environments. BEA
acquired Flashline in August. The BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository
2.5 is intended to assist customers with governance in SOA, specifically
in dealing with managing IT assets in these architectures. Information
is maintained about Web services types and definitions, service
dependencies and ownership of services, said Paul Patrick, vice
president and chief architect for AquaLogic at BEA. New features
include support for XPDL (XML Process Definition Language) and support
for the BEA WebLogic Server 9.2 application server. XPDL is used for
business process assets management. WebLogic Server 9.2 features
zero-downtime capabilities, although this was first offered in the
Version 9.0 release of the application server, according to BEA. BEA's
repository also can run on the IBM WebSphere and Apache Tomcat
platforms. HP, meanwhile, is expanding its SOA Competency Center
program, with the company planning to open facilities in Cupertino,
Calif.; Singapore; and Bangalore, India. The Cupertino and Bangalore
facilities open on Monday; the Singapore site opens next month. The
company in 2005 opened its first SOA Competency Centers in Sophia
Antipolis, France, and Tokyo.
CSS3 Working Drafts for Paged Media, Values and Units
Hakon Wium Lie (et al., eds), W3C Technical Reports
W3C's CSS Working Group has announced the release of two updated Working
Drafts for: (1) "Cascading Style Sheets Level 3 (CSS3) - Generated
Content for Paged Media" and (2) "CSS3 Values and Units." The 'Paged
Media' module describes features often used in printed publications. In
particular, this specification describes how CSS style sheets can
express named strings, leaders, cross-references, footnotes, endnotes,
running headers and footers, named flows, ad hoc counter styles, paged-
based floats, hyphenation, change bars, named page lists, and generated
lists. Along with two other CSS3 modules — multicolumn layout and paged
media — this module offers a way of presenting structured documents on
paged media. This specification offers two mechanisms: one is named
strings which copies the text (and not style, structure, or replaced
content) from one element for later reuse. Named strings are described
in this section. Later, a mechanism for moving elements (including its
style and structure) into a running headers/footer is described. The
"Values and Units" Working Draft is a CSS3 module which describes the
various values and units that CSS properties accept. Also, it describes
how values are computed from "specified" (which is what the cascading
process yields) through "computed" and "used" into "actual" values. The
main purpose of this module is to define common values and units in one
specification which can be referred to by other modules. As such, it
does not make sense to claim conformance with this module alone.
See also: http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-css3-values-20060919/
OASIS Creates DITA Machine Industry Subcommittee
Staff, OASIS Announcement
Members of the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)
Technical Committee have formed a DITA Machine Industry Subcommittee
to "help to galvanize the role of DITA specializations across industries
that have common issues for hardware-related description." The group
plans to: (1) Develop a design for structured, intent-based authoring
of content tailored to the needs in the machine industry (e.g., hazard
statements, special task types for preventive, corrective, predictive
and condition based maintenance)l (2) Establish guidelines that promote
best practices for applying standard DITA approaches to the needs in
the machine industry (language reference, user guide, training material).
The group will work to develop DITA DTDs schemas and processing, and
pilot/validate the top-level designs against sample content. They
will work on embedding the sample DTDs, schemas and sample documents
into the DITA-OT (Toolkit) demo section for field tests and feedbacks.
See also: other DITA Subcommittees
Berners-Lee: Semantic Web's Success Lies in Cooperation
Jonathan Bennett, CNET News.com
Creating a Semantic Web will need organizations to think beyond their
own industries, according to Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World
Wide Web Consortium. Speaking at a conference in Southampton, England
Berners-Lee said all that was needed to build the Semantic Web was for
existing databases to be exposed in standard formats: the power of the
Semantic Web comes not from a single source of data, but from when
multiple data sources are combined. The Semantic Web project aims to
add machine-readable content to address the fact that the Web is
largely still a mass of unstructured data with little to link groups
of documents together, and no way for computers to manipulate the
information in pages. Berners-Lee gave the example that Ordnance Survey
records the location of a church, but not its denomination, but that
this information was held elsewhere. "When you start querying properties
of (geographic) features, it's no longer just a geographic system. It
becomes a generic Semantic Web query," he said. He believes that this
commonality can be achieved without having to start from scratch or
modify systems. The RDF necessary to make the sharing of geographic
information systems (GIS) data possible can be dynamically generated,
he explained, in the same way as the HTML for large Web sites is
dynamically generated by a content-management system.
See also: W3C Semantic Web
Build Open IT Management Solutions: Service Management Using DIAL
Stephen B. Morris, IBM developerWorks
Information technology (IT) management is dogged by incompatible,
vendor-specific data formats. This has produced vendor-lockin, with
the same vendors supplying both hardware and management software in
conjunction with expensive consultancy — all to keep the fragile
infrastructure up and running. The emerging Device Independent
Authoring Language (DIAL) standard might offer a medium-term data
migration solution to the growing management crisis. DIAL allows for
interaction in its rendered form: Machines can render and respond to
DIAL data. Although the emerging DIAL standard mostly addresses the
needs of human users, a broad range of applications exists that use
machines to access Web data. Given that DIAL is based on XML, this
automatically opens compliant data to the wide range of available
software tools. You can easily define simple vocabularies for legacy
data, and create Java tools to transform from legacy to DIAL-compliant
format. Doing so will help open a marketplace for much-needed IT
management tools that has heretofore been closed. DIAL allows the
inclusion of XHTML2 object modules. These are flexible data
definitions that provide detailed instructions about how to process
the associated data. Thus managed devices can provide hints on how
to use specific data. Migrating management data into DIAL format is
much easier with appropriate transformation software. This is a
relatively straightforward (if laborious) process. Once the data is
in the required format, the IT management tools can use it as usual.
The main difference is that the IT management infrastructure is now
open and standards-compliant.
See also: the W3C DIAL specification
SIP and SAML Roaming Profile
Silvana G. Polito and Henning Schulzrinne, IETF Internet Draft
Roaming services allow users that have a contract with a voice service
provider to use access resources owned by other providers known as
internet access providers. This draft proposes a token-based
Authentication, Authorization, Accounting (AAA) and billing model for
roaming users. It also introduces a protocol solution for the proposed
model that is based on the Assertion Markup Language (SAML) protocol
and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The SAML protocol defines a
way for the exchange of security information about a subject between
partners called requesting, asserting and relying parties. The asserting
party is the entity that produces an authentication and authorization
assertion about a subject when required by the requesting party. While
the relying party uses the assertion for authorizing the subject. This
draft defines a new SAML profile, called roaming SAML profile. The
profile defines a set of specifications that allows to use SAML for
the description of the token and the token building request and response.
In the SAML roaming profile, the voice service providers (VSPs) assumes
the role of SAML requesting parties, the guarantor the one of asserting
party, and internet access providers (IAPs) the one of relying parties.
See also: SAML references
OpenAjax Alliance Tackles Interoperability
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Looking to bolster AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and
development of Web 2.0 applications, the OpenAjax Alliance on Wednesday
plans to introduce a project that addresses AJAX interoperability issues.
The alliance, which features vendors such as IBM, Oracle, and Sun
Microsystems, will roll out its OpenAjax Hub project. This effort
involves developing a standard set of JavaScript functionality to
tackle problems with interoperability arising when multiple AJAX
libraries are used within the same Web page. With the hub, multiple
AJAX run-time libraries would be able to coexist on a page. Version 1.0
of the OpenAjax Hub is planned for completion by the end of this
calendar year; integration of the hub into AJAX toolkits expected in
early 2007. Support for the hub is expected in toolkits such as Dojo
and script.aculo.us as well as in AJAX frameworks such as Tibco General
Interface and offerings from Backbase, JackBe and Nexaweb. The unveiling
of the hub is part of an update on the alliance's activities that is
being provided Wednesday. The group will announce a near-doubling of its
membership since its formation in February. New members include The
Ajaxian, American Greetings, Bling Software, Curl, edge IPK, eLink
Business Innovations, ENOVIA, MatrixOne, Finetooth, The Front Side,
Ikivo, ILOG, IN2, IT Mill, Javeline, JWAX, Merced Systems, Nexaweb,
Nitobi, OpenLink Software, Seagull Software, Sitepen, Sun, Vertex Logic,
Vircon, Webtide, and Zoho. The alliance seeks to serve as an industry
catalyst to boost AJAX-enabled Web 2.0 applications. Ferraiolo defines
Web 2.0 as a new generation of the Web focused on collaboration. OpenAjax
technologies are intended to produce lower development costs, faster
delivery of applications, vendor choice, interoperability, and a richer
Web experience. Greater collaboration capabilities that can be added to
existing HTML sites or used for new applications is another goal. Also
being unveiled on Wednesday is the organization's Web site and a white
paper covering a description of AJAX, the AJAX value proposition and a
technical section on AJAX architectures. These architectures include
single and dual DOMs (Document Object Model), in which the single model
involves processing everything in HTML browsers, while the dual approach
involves using an XML parser that holds the description of the UI.
International Alliance to Study RFID, Wireless Security
Renee Boucher Ferguson, eWEEK
A new consortium, the International Technology Alliance, has been tapped
to by both the United States Army Research Laboratory and United Kingdom
Ministry of Defense to conduct a study to explore RFID and secure wireless
technology that will support future collation operations. The study,
which could play out over a 10-year period and cost about $135.8 million,
looks to better enable coalition forces to quickly gather, interpret and
share battlefield information to coordinate actions, according to a
September 18, 2006 statement from IBM. The goal of ITA, according to
U.S. Army Chief Scientist Thomas Killion, is to focus innovation on the
scientific enablers of net-centric warfare. The group — led by IBM but
including 25 trans-continental partners — brings together industry and
academic groups in four areas of research: network theory; security
across a system of systems; RFID information collection and processing;
and distributed coalition planning and decision making. The companies
involved in the ITA consortium include IBM, BBN Technologies, the Boeing
Company, Honeywell. Applied Research Associates from the U.S. Companies
based in the United Kingdom include IBM (again) LogicaCMG, Roke Manor
Research and Systems Engineering and Assessment. Participants from the
U.S. academia field are Carnegie Mellon University, City University of
New York, Columbia University, University of Maryland, University of
Massachusetts Amherst, Pennsylvania State University, Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute and the University of California at Los Angeles.
See also: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
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