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XML and Web Services In The News - 9 October 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Sun Microsystems
HEADLINES:
Call for Review: Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.1
Anders Berglund (ed), W3C Proposed Recommendation
W3C is has announced the advancement of the "Extensible Stylesheet
Language (XSL) Version 1.1" to the level of Proposed Recommendation.
XSL is a language for expressing stylesheets. Given a class of
arbitrarily structured XML 1.0 or XML 1.1 documents or data files,
designers use an XSL stylesheet to express their intentions about how
that structured content should be presented; that is, how the source
content should be styled, laid out, and paginated onto some presentation
medium, such as a window in a Web browser or a hand-held device, or a
set of physical pages in a catalog, report, pamphlet, or book. An XSL
stylesheet processor accepts a document or data in XML and an XSL
stylesheet and produces the presentation of that XML source content
that was intended by the designer of that stylesheet. There are two
aspects of this presentation process: first, constructing a result
tree from the XML source tree and second, interpreting the result
tree to produce formatted results suitable for presentation on a
display, on paper, in speech, or onto other media. The first aspect
is called tree transformation and the second is called formatting.
The process of formatting is performed by the formatter. This
formatter may simply be a rendering engine inside a browser. XSL
Version 1.1 updates and enhances the XSL 1.0 Recommendation for
change marks, indexes, multiple flows, and bookmarks, and extends
support for graphics scaling, markers, and page numbers. This
revision of XSL adds only optional features. Two of these have not
been fully implemented in more than one product. However, they are
optional, and one of the features is specific to the formatting of
vertical text, mostly Japanese and Chinese, which is not part of the
primary target for the other implementors at this time, but all
languages and cultures are of course important on the World Wide Web.
See also: the W3C news item
SOA Finds Its VoIP
Leon Erlanger, InfoWorld
Outside of the call center, voice/data applications have yet to take off.
But adding unified communications services to SOA environments may
change all that. PBX vendors Siemens and Avaya, as well as data upstarts
BlueNote Networks and Ubiquity Software, are laying the groundwork today.
Back-office service and application providers such as Salesforce.com
and SAP are also jumping on the bandwagon, communications-enabling CRM
and ERP applications, along with enterprise integrators such as IBM
Global Services and Accenture. SOA-enabled unified communications are
not just another form of CTI (computer-telephony integration), more of
the click-to-call and customer screen pops you've seen in the call
center for years. The interactions between voice and data may well
pervade the enterprise and will harness presence, 'find me/follow me'
(which tries multiple communication channels for a single user
simultaneously), Web conferencing and video conferencing, and other
advanced unified communications features to enhance collaboration,
decision-making, and customer service. Applications will no longer have
to access these functions directly through the specialized CTI protocols,
such as TAPI, JTAPI, and CSTA, of yore. Business developers will no
longer need to learn the intricacies of SIP. Instead, they can build
applications that access unified communications in loosely coupled
fashion via Web services protocols. SOA provides an architecture for
spreading the benefits of unified communications across multiple
business processes and applications quickly, flexibly, and with far less
telephony expertise. But developing applications that work across a
number of different back-end voice systems without recoding will
require a common set of unified communications WSDL definitions and
core features among communications vendors. Standards for presence and
other unified communications features also must evolve to foster
interoperability in this emerging area.
Health Care and Life Sciences Public Workshop on Semantic Web
Robert Sayre, W3C Announcement
W3C's Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG)
has announced a public ISWC workshop on Semantic Web Health Care
and Life Sciences, to be held on 6-November-2006 in Athens, Georgia,
USA, at the Fifth International Semantic Web Conference. The agenda
has been published. The meeting will consist of presentations that
provide an overview to HCLS and the ongoing tasks. There will be
active discussion sessions that focus on controversial topics. In
addition, high quality presentations will be selected from the community
that focus on the application of the Semantic Web to life sciences
and/or health care. Aiding decision-making in clinical research and
drug discovery, Semantic Web technologies will bridge many forms of
biological and medical information across institutions. The Semantic
Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG) was
chartered to develop and support the use of Semantic Web technologies
and practices to improve collaboration, research and development, and
innovation adoption in the of Health Care and Life Science domains.
Success in these domains depends on a foundation of semantically rich
system, process and information interoperability.
See also: XML in Healthcare Industries
Explore Streamlined's Metamodel and Customization Strategies
Bruce Tate, IBM developerWorks
Part 1 of this two-article series introduced Streamlined, a Rails-based
open source framework that combines the power of Ajax, metaprogramming,
and code generation to take Rails productivity to a new level. This
Part 2 installment explores how the metamodel behind Streamlined enables
customizations. In Streamlined, you have a combination of a framework
with higher language abstractions, code generation, and customization
hooks for extension. A common metamodel drives everything. Using this
technique, the framework has a focus that's primarily on the user
interface, but you can start to see it push beyond mere Web pages.
Streamlined provides, or will soon provide, all of the following: (1)
Atom feeds for content syndication: This will let other applications on
the Web consume an automated XML feed, produced by Streamlined
applications, and conforming to a common standard. (2) XML and CSV
exports: Streamlined allows exports in common data formats. (3) Queries
and filters: Streamlined lets you filter content with simple queries,
and then use the results. (4) REST-based Web services: Streamlined
initially had Web services support but removed it because Rails
architects are redesigning the Web services support to be based on the
Simply RESTful plug-in system. Streamlined is striving to become, in
the near future, a metaprogramming framework that lets you create an
arbitrary template and plug in existing Rails components, generators,
and plug-ins. This framework will go beyond look and feel to create a
common architecture, potentially creating an extremely powerful
corporate application generator.
Computational Science Educational Reference Desk
Diana Tanase, David A. Joiner, Jonathan Stuart-Moore, D-Lib Magazine
The Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD) is a portal
to the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) that opens its virtual
shelves to those interested in educational resources for computational
science. If one wants to find trustworthy resources on the behavior of
tsunami waves, on creating computer models for building bridges,
simulations of molecule interaction, or many other related topics, the
CSERD portal is designed to help in that search. One of the goals of
the CSERD project is to assemble, organize, and share its collection
of metadata. Of existing metadata management systems, a package that
was found to meet our requirements while also integrating well with
other systems is the Collection Workflow Integration System (CWIS).
In addition to providing a customizable front-end to the portal, this
software generates Open Archive Initiative (OAI) files that can be
incorporated by NSDL. Customizing CWIS required importing existing
metadata, changing its look and feel, and linking it to the VV&A tool.
Once the customized Plone and CWIS instances were deployed, the next
step was to create a seamless communication channel between the two.
Specifically, hyperlinks that included the catalog item id of the
resource were added to send the user back and forth between the two
platforms for services as needed: to Plone for editing or submitting
reviews, and to CWIS for browsing or searching through the metadata.
See also: Open Archives Initiative Protocol (OAI-PMH)
Interview: Microsoft, Apple Eyed for AJAX Alliance
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
In February 2006, a group of technology vendors, including BEA Systems,
Google, IBM, and Oracle, formed the OpenAjax Alliance, with the goal
of promoting the popular AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web
development technique. Since then, more vendors, such as Sun
Microsystems, have joined, and the alliance has launched its OpenAjax
Hub project to boost interoperability among AJAX libraries. One of
the founders of OpenAjax was David Boloker, who holds the titles of
distinguished engineer and CTO of emerging Internet technologies at
the IBM software group. He also serves on the alliance's steering
committee. Excerpts from the Boloker interview: AJAX enables you in
a Web browser to actually have some of the same qualities of an
interaction that you used to have only in a fat client setting... you
can have one person's UI widget working with your UI widget, and these
are all in JavaScript. And each and every one of the toolkits today,
actually, expects to own the whole page; so they're going to basically
take control, and expect to; then, when you leave their page, they
lose control. Well, what really is going to have to happen is, you may
like someone's Accordion control from one toolkit and want to use it,
for example, with Tibco's. So one of the things which we started
working on was something called OpenAjax Hub inside of OpenAjax, which
is [aimed at allowing that interoperability], and that's going to be
an open source plan... I actually just spoke with Microsoft yesterday
about joining OpenAjax, and they've taken back the details and are
thinking about it, and they'll get back to us...it makes a difference
because I'd actually like to have them at the table. They have some
very, very skilled developers, and they've thought about the area a
lot, just as Tibco has and IBM has and JackBe has and others. It
would be actually great if we actually can get everyone to the table,
and I'm really hoping that we can do it.
DRM May Mean Strange Anti-Apple Bedfellows
Larry Dignan, eWEEK
Digital rights management conflicts could make for some strange
bedfellows as hunting season opens on Apple and its iTunes juggernaut.
While the FSF is officially ranting about DRM and its use by "big media,"
it's no coincidence that Apple is the first target. Apple essentially
owns the music industry right now, and a lot of folks aren't happy
about it. Apple has used its iTunes and iPod juggernaut to make its DRM
software ubiquitous. # Microsoft could ultimately come around to the FSF
position. There are sites such as e-Music that sell tunes without DRM
(mostly from independent labels). Let's assume Zune flops and Apple
owns DRM. It's possible Microsoft would say DRM is evil. It sees the
light. If Microsoft couldn't own the standard, why wouldn't the company
undercut it? Suddenly the FSF and Redmond folks are on the same side.
The music industry and the FSF could actually agree. On July 19, 2006
Sony BMG and Yahoo offered a new Jessica Simpson single for $1.99
without DRM restrictions. Instead of DRM, the song was personalized
with the buyer's name. Yahoo has been an outspoken critic of DRM. The
big takeaway: The music industry is open to experimentation. Why? There
are other business models to explore and the industry can't let Apple
dominate. These developments won't happen overnight, but don't rule
them out. Apple's potential to dictate the DRM game has a lot of people
worried. Don't be surprised if some of these combatants wind up on the
same side.
See also: DRM and XML
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