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XML and Web Services In The News - 6 October 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP
HEADLINES:
Final Office Open XML Readied
Peter Sayer, InfoWorld
Standards body Ecma International expects to publish the final draft
of the Office Open XML file formats specification proposed by Microsoft
Corp. as early as Monday [2006-10-09], ahead of a formal vote to adopt
the specification as a standard in December. Governments are taking an
interest in open-standard document formats as a way to guarantee access
to legacy public information, and to avoid dependence on developers of
proprietary software. Denmark's government voted in June to mandate the
use of open-standard document formats in central government from Jan. 1,
2008. For now, five ministries are testing the OpenDocument Format (ODF)
standard, used in open-source software suite OpenOffice.org, and also
in proprietary software including Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice and
IBM Corp.'s Workplace. ODF is a rival to Office Open XML. If ECMA
approves the Office Open XML format, used by Microsoft in its forthcoming
Office 2007 software suite, the Danish ministries could use that instead.
The French government is conducting a public inquiry into how to make
its computer systems interoperable, but has reached no conclusions yet.
However, in a report commissioned by the prime minister, National
Assembly Deputy Bernard Carayon called for a law making it compulsory
for French government departments to use ODF when they create or
distribute documents. He suggested that France ask its European partners
to do likewise when exchanging documents at a European level. The
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) approved the ODF
standard in May, but the Office Open XML specification is still some
way off that status. Ecma's General Assembly will vote on the text
during its meeting on Dec. 7 and Dec. 8. It cannot amend the text, only
accept or reject it. If the final draft of the Office Open XML
specification wins the assembly's approval, it will become an Ecma
standard, and go on to ISO for fast-track approval, which can take six
months to nine months. ISO may request amendments to the standard before
voting to approve it. Both Ecma and ISO are based in Switzerland.
IBM Donates Open-Source Technology for AJAX, Web 2.0 Development
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
IBM announced that it will make another round of technology
contributions to the open-source community to promote the use of Web
2.0 technologies in the enterprise. At the AJAXWorld conference in
Santa Clara, IBM officials said the systems giant will make additional
contributions to the Eclipse Foundation's ATF (AJAX Technology Framework)
and the Mozilla Foundation. IBM proposed the ATF project in January
2006. The company then led the project and donated code to Eclipse to
create ATF. Now the company says ATF project developers will work
directly with IBM RAD (Rational Application Developer) 7.0 toolkit,
which is slated for availability later in 2006. RAD 7.0, along with
the ATF Toolkit, will give developers more advanced JavaScript tooling
capabilities and end-to-end enterprise development using AJAX
(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), the company said. IBM is contributing
technology that will enable clients to run, deploy, debug and configure
AJAX technology on any Web server, including WebSphere, Tomcat, Apache,
JBoss and WebLogic, IBM officials said. And the technology brings new
features to ATF, including enhancements to make it unnecessary to
manually refresh a browser to send or receive information over the Web.
Meanwhile, IBM also announced that the company has opened a new Web
development zone on its developerWorks community site. The Web
development zone features technical resources for AJAX, PHP, ATOM, RSS
and Ruby development, as well as for Web development frameworks such
as Spring, Shale, Struts, Ruby on Rails, and Tapestry.
JSON Uniform Messaging Protocol (JUMP)
Robert Sayre, IETF Internet Draft
R. Sayre of Mozilla Corporation has published an -00 level IETF
individual Internet Draft for "JSON Uniform Messaging Protocol (JUMP)."
JUMP uses HTTP and a lightweight layout for JSON records to edit the
Web. JSON (RFC 4627) provides an interoperable object serialization
format capable of representing numbers, strings, arrays, and a wide
range of Unicode characters. The JUMP specification defines a
loosely-coupled protocol based on a small set of conventions for JSON
records and a profile of HTTP.
See also: JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
Web Services Hints and Tips: JAX-RPC vs JAX-WS
Russell Butek and Nicholas Gallardo, IBM developerWorks
Web services have been around a while now. First there was SOAP. But
SOAP only described what the messages looked like. Then there was WSDL.
But WSDL didn't tell you how to write Web services in Java. Then along
came JAX-RPC 1.0. After a few months of use, the Java Community Process
(JCP) folks who wrote that specification realized that it needed a few
tweaks, so out came JAX-RPC 1.1. After a year or so of using that
specification, the JCP folks wanted to build a better version: JAX-RPC
2.0. A primary goal was to align with industry direction, but the
industry was not merely doing RPC Web services, they were also doing
message-oriented Web services. So "RPC" was removed from the name and
replaced with "WS" & which stands for Web Services, of course. Thus
the successor to JAX-RPC 1.1 is JAX-WS 2.0 - the Java API for XML-based
Web services. JAX-WS 2.0 is the successor to JAX-RPC 1.1. There are
some things that haven't changed, but most of the programming model is
different to a greater or lesser degree. The topics introduced in this
tip will be expanded upon in a series of tips which we will publish
over the coming months that will compare, in detail, JAX-WS and JAX-RPC.
At a high level though, there are a few reasons why you would or would
not want to move to JAX-WS from JAX-RPC. Reasons you may want to stay
with JAX-RPC 1.1 [...] and reasons to step up to JAX-WS 2.0...
SPARQL Query Language for RDF
Eric Prud'hommeaux and Andy Seaborne (eds), W3C technical Report
W3C's RDF Data Access Working Group has released an updated Working
Draft for the "SPARQL Query Language for RDF." SPARQL (pronounced
"sparkle") offers developers and end users a way to write and to consume
search results across a wide range of information such as personal data,
social networks and metadata about digital artifacts like music and
images. The SPARQL query language consists of the syntax and semantics
for asking and answering queries against RDF graphs. SPARQL contains
capabilities for querying by triple patterns, conjunctions, disjunctions,
and optional patterns. It also supports constraining queries by source
RDF graph and extensible value testing. Results of SPARQL queries can
be ordered, limited and offset in number, and presented in several
different forms. RDF is a flexible and extensible way to represent
information about World Wide Web resources. It is used to represent,
among other things, personal information, social networks, metadata
about digital artifacts, as well as provide a means of integration
over disparate sources of information. A standardized query language
for RDF data with multiple implementations offers developers and end
users a way to write and to consume the results of queries across this
wide range of information. Used with a common protocol, applications
can access and combine information from across the Web.
See also: W3C Semantic Web
After the Buzz, Ajax Goes to Work
Andy Patrizio, InternetNews.com
Ajax is an example of the whole being greater than the sum of its
parts. And the big developers have all caught the Ajax religion. Sun
recently picked an Ajax architect to lead the company's efforts while
IBM has partnered with the Open Source Dojo Foundation to help drive
Ajax development. Put JavaScript, Dynamic HTML, and XML together and
you have the cure for one of the Web's biggest nuisances -- screen
refreshes. Anyone who has shopped online knows that headache. The
infinite number of redraws and refreshes can be a major drag on
getting your business done. It feels nothing like a desktop
application, but Ajax will provide just that. Helmi Technologies of
Finland is preparing an open source Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
Platform, due for release at the end of the year, which covers both
issues. It generates the JavaScript from Java applications, so no
scripting has to be written. For security, the Ajax application is
actually executed on a proxy server on the back end and then
replicated down to the client, so the client is just displaying
information. Nothing is executed on it. Nexaweb is working on
something similar with its Universal Client Framework (UCF), also
announced at the show. UCF allows for wrapping existing applications
in an Ajax framework and deploying them on the Web, a common theme
among other vendors here, as well.
Top 10 Reasons It's Almost Impossible to Compete with Google
Steve Bryant, eWEEK
The search engine market has metastastized into an online media market.
The bar set by the world's largest search engine now includes a heckuva
lot more than fancy algorithms running in a data center. So how much
is a good piece of Google-killing software worth? Today there's news
that a company called Powerset is trying to raise $10M and boasting that
its search technology is better than Google's. According to VentureBeat,
the company is trying to hype themselves into a $20M valuation, using
the promise of Google-killing tech as a lure. But here's the rub: Even
if your tech is better, you can't compete with Google just because you
have a great search engine. At this point, the search engine market has
metastasized into an online media market. The bar set by the world's
largest search engine now includes a heckuva lot more than fancy
algorithms running in a data center. Today you not only have to have
great technology for online searches, you also need to compete in
offline media markets as well. Not to mention you need partners (large
and small). [We present] ten reasons Google has competitive advantages
not easily equalled or surpassed...
SAP Achieves Java EE 5 Certification
Renee Boucher Ferguson, eWEEK
Hoping to land more than a glancing blow against Oracle's claims that
SAP is far from standards based, SAP has announced that the latest
version of its application server is now certified on Sun's Java EE 5
standard. The certification means that customers and partners can
develop Java applications on SAP's NetWeaver platform using Sun's
latest Java standard, which passed ratification last May. Graham
Hamilton, vice president and Fellow in the Java platform team at Sun
describes the Java EE 5 standard in his blog as "by far the biggest
developer event of 2006,"since it "radically simplifies" Java J2EE
development, especially for Web services and transactional components.
SAP does in fact have a proprietary programming language, ABAP. But
back around 2002, the company added Java compatibility to its
application server, which was furthered with the addition of its
NetWeaver integration (and development) platform the following year.
The company has since maintained certification with each new Java
standard. What's more important to users, however, is that with a
combined Java and ABAP application server they can still leverage
their investment in SAP by programming in ABAP, but they don't have
to: users are also able to build and deploy new applications in a
Web services environment using Java. According to the announcement:
"SAP is an active contributor to the Java Community Process (JCP)
and a member of the JCP SE/EE Executive Committee. SAP contributes
to more than 50 Java Specification Requests (JSRs) that drive Web
services, portals and user interface technology, systems and content
management, robust virtual machine technology, Java supportability,
and more."
See also: the announcement
Standards to Stimulate E-Voting?
Candace Lombardi, CNET News.com
The [U.S.] government was quick to trust the Internet with tax returns,
but it still has not managed to organize a paperless voting system.
What's the holdup? Many voting citizens, whether they consider
themselves red, blue or green, have been asking that question since
the 2000 election shed light on how inconsistent, and often low-tech,
the voting systems are in the United States. Standardization of data
fields, interoperability between counties and states, and an
unwillingness on the part of local municipalities to embrace change are
some of the major obstacles, according to panelists at the Voter
Identification/Registration Conference, hosted by the CalTech/MIT
Voting Technology Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
on Thursday and Friday. The panel put aside legal issues concerning
e-voting machines and, instead, concentrated on how technology could
be used to ensure that electronic voter registration and identification
is valid and consistently maintained. One of the most basic problems
across the states, Brace said, is trying to match and verify data when
there is no standardization for reporting voter registration rolls or
for constructing data fields. Some states keep both active and inactive
voters on the rolls, some states retain only active voters, and some
leave the decision up to individual counties. The differences lie not
just between states, or between various departments of motor vehicles
and voter registration systems, but between counties within the same
state. Names, for example, which should be broken out into first-,
middle- and last-name fields, appear as one name field in many data
sets, according to Brace. Suffixes like Jr. and Sr., and the modern
use of hyphenated or two-word last names, has also added to the
confusion. Some counties even collapse street address, town, ZIP code
and state into one address field rather than breaking them out.
See also: Markup Languages for Names and Addresses
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