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XML and Web Services In The News - 18 October 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by BEA Systems, Inc.
HEADLINES:
The Unicode Standard 5.0: An Appreciation
Andy Updegrove, ConsortiumInfo.org
According to James J. O'Donnell, Provost, Georgetown University: "Unicode
marks the most significant advance in writing systems since the
Phoenicians." There are fundamental standards that are constantly in
the news, such as XML (and its many offspring). And there are standards
development organizations, like the W3C, that enjoy a high profile in
part because of the importance of the technical domains that they serve.
Some standards have even taken on socio-political significance, becoming
pawns in international diplomacy, such as the root domains of the
Internet, despite the fact that they are insignificant in size and design.
But there are other standards that go largely unheralded, and are
developed by consortia that are virtually never in the news, despite
the vast social and technical significance of the standard in question.
Perhaps chief among them is the Unicode, created and constantly extended
by the Unicode Consortium, whose loyal and widely distributed team of
contributors for the most part labor quietly in the background of
information technology. Notwithstanding the low profile of the Unicode
and its creators, it is this standard that enables nearly all those
living in the world today to communicate with each other in their native
language character sets. It even permits the words of many of those that
lived in the past to become accessible to those alive today in
electronic form, and in their original character sets as well.
See also: the XML and Unicode
DocBook Version 4.5 Approved as an OASIS Standard
Staff, OASIS Announcement
OASIS announced the release of DocBook Version 4.5 as an OASIS Standard.
Widely adopted by technical writers since its introduction in 1991,
DocBook provides an XML markup vocabulary for authoring and exchange of
prose content, especially technical documentation. Norman Walsh, of Sun
Microsystems and chair of the OASIS DocBook Technical Committee says:
"DocBook enables you to author and store documents in a presentation-
neutral form that captures the logical structure and semantics of the
content. With DocBook, you can transform and publish content in HTML,
PDF, RTF, and many other formats. There have been lots of improvements,
both large and small, since the last OASIS Standard version of DocBook,
among them: new inline elements for finer control over content,
improvements in internationalization and accessibility, support for
HTML tables, more support for mathematics, and more generally available
metadata." DocBook provides a system for writing structured documents
using XML. It is particularly well-suited to books and papers about
computer hardware and software, though it is by no means limited to
them. DocBook is an XML schema. Because it is a large and robust schema,
and because its main structures correspond to the general notion of what
constitutes a book, DocBook has been adopted by a large and growing
community of authors. DocBook is supported 'out of the box' by a number
of commercial tools, and support for it is rapidly growing in a number
of free software environments. In short, DocBook is an easy-to-understand
and widely used schema. Dozens of organizations use DocBook for millions
of pages of documentation, in various print and online formats, worldwide.
The DocBook TC has also produced several versions of Version 5.0,
rewritten as a native RELAX NG grammar. The goals of this redesign were
to produce a schema that 'feels like, DocBook, so that most existing
documents should still be valid or it should be possible to transform
them in simple, mechanical ways into valid documents. It also enforces
as many constraints as possible in the schema. Some additional
constraints are expressed with Schematron rules.
See also: on DocBook 5.0
"Web Services Policy Primer" — a New W3C Working Draft
Asir Vedamuthu, David Orchard, Maryann Hondo et al., W3C Working Draft
W3C's Web Services Policy Working Group has released the First Public
Working Draft for the "Web Services Policy 1.5 - Primer." This
introduction to the Web Services Policy language is designed for
authors of policy expressions and assertions and for implementers whose
software modules read and write policy expressions. Basic and advanced
concepts are presented through examples. The primer can be read
alongside the normative Policy Framework and Attachment specifications.
Web Services Policy is a machine-readable language for representing the
capabilities and requirements of a Web service. These are called
‘policies'. Web Services Policy offers mechanisms to represent
consistent combinations of capabilities and requirements, to determine
the compatibility of policies, to name and reference policies and to
associate policies with Web service metadata constructs such as service,
endpoint and operation. Web Services Policy is a simple language that
has four elements (Policy, All, ExactlyOne and PolicyReference) and
one attribute, wsp:Optional. Web services are being successfully used
for interoperable solutions across various industries. One of the key
reasons for interest and investment in Web services is that they are
well-suited to enable service-oriented systems. XML-based technologies
such as SOAP, XML Schema and WSDL provide a broadly-adopted foundation
on which to build interoperable Web services. The WS-Policy and
WS-PolicyAttachment specifications extend this foundation and offer
mechanisms to represent the capabilities and requirements of Web
services as Policies.
See also: Web Services Policy 1.5 - Framework
ASHRAE and ANSI Approve BACnet/WS Web Services Interface Specification
ASHRAE/SSPC 135 Staff, ASHRAE Announcement
Members of the BACnet WS project have announced that Addendum
135-2004c, BACnet Web Services, has been approved by ASHRAE and ANSI.
BACnet is an XML-based Data Communication Protocol for Building
Automation and Control Networks. The purpose of this addendum is to
revise ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 135-2004. The modifications in this
addendum are the result of change proposals made pursuant to the
ASHRAE continuous maintenance procedures and of deliberations within
Standing Standard Project Committee 135. The annex defines a data
model and Web service interface for integrating facility data from
disparate data sources with a variety of business management
applications. The data model and access services are generic and can
be used to model and access data from any source, whether the server
owns the data locally or is acting as a gateway to other standard or
proprietary protocols. Implementations of the services described in
this standard shall conform to the Web Services Interoperability
Organization (WS-I) Basic Profile 1.0, which specifies the use of
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1 over Hypertext Transfer
Protocol — HTTP/1.1 (RFC2616) and encodes the data for transport
using Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Second Edition), which
uses the datatypes and the lexical and canonical representations
defined by the World Wide Web Consortium XML Schema. Clients may
determine the version of the BACnet/WS standard that a server
implements by querying a specific numerical value as defined in
clause N.9.
See also: XML for Facilities Automation Systems
SAMLv2 Lightweight Web Browser SSO Profile
Jeff Hodges and Scott Cantor, IETF Internet Draft
This document specifies a SAMLv2 lightweight Web Browser Single
Sign-On Profile. This profile is modeled on the OASIS SAMLv2 Web
Browser SSO profile, adding various constraints, and using a new
lighterweight SAMLv2 HTTP POST binding offering an optional signature
technique that is more simple-to-implement than the also optional XML
Digital Signature approach. XML digital signature (XMLdsig) is made
optional because it is asserted by various implementors that
implementation support for it is essentially non-existent in so-called
"scripting" environments, e.g. PERL/PYTHON/PHP/Ruby, and/or different
implementations of it are not very interoperable as yet, due to the
inherent complexity of the specificaion and its required behaviors. In
the scenario supported by the web browser SSO profile, a web user
either accesses a resource at a service provider, or accesses an
identity provider such that the service provider and desired resource
are understood or implicit. The web user authenticates (or has already
authenticated) to the identity provider, which then produces an
authentication assertion (possibly with input from the service provider)
and the service provider consumes the assertion to establish a security
context for the web user. During this process, a name identifier might
also be established between the providers for the principal, subject
to the parameters of the interaction and the consent of the parties.
See also: SAML references
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Core
P. Saint-Andre (ed), IETF Internet Draft
A version -00 draft of 'rfc3920bis' has been published for "Extensible
Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Core." With intended
informational status, and intent to obsolete RFC 3920, this memo
defines the core features of the Extensible Messaging and Presence
Protocol (XMPP), a technology for streaming Extensible Markup Language
(XML) elements in order to exchange structured information in close to
real time between any two network-aware entities. XMPP provides a
generalized, extensible framework for incrementally exchanging XML data,
upon which a variety of applications can be built. The framework
includes methods for stream setup and teardown, channel encryption,
authentication of a client to a server and of one server to another
server, and primitives for push-style messages, publication of presence
and availability information, and request-response interactions between
any two XMPP entities. This document also specifies the format for XMPP
addresses, which are fully internationalizable. The purpose of XMPP is
to enable the exchange of relatively small pieces of structured data
(called "XML stanzas") over a network between any two (or more)
entities. XMPP is implemented using a client-server architecture,
wherein a client must connect to a server in order to gain access to
the network and thus be allowed to exchange XML stanzas with other
entities.
Why SOA and VoIP Will Converge
Jon Udell, InfoWorld
Voice and data networking remain two different cultures that have so
far failed spectacularly to come together. But I'm stubbornly optimistic
that sooner or later they will. There are too many opportunities to
ignore, and those opportunities multiply as service orientation takes
hold. Consider a business process that's been automated, SOA-style. A
BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) script orchestrates the flow
of XML payloads through a sequence of steps, untouched by human hands,
until an exception occurs. In all such workflows, people are the
exception handlers of last resort. Setting up that call in response to
a BPEL exception is exactly the kind of thing that BlueNote's
SessionSuite SOA Edition is designed to do. In a world where SOA and
VoIP work hand in hand, more natural scenarios become possible. I have,
for example, been dealing with a stalled purchase order of my own for
several days. The business rule says that I have to contact two parties,
who must in turn reach an agreement. But we've all been playing voice-
mail or e-mail tag, and so far we haven't managed to close the loop.
It's admittedly creepy to imagine empowering that business rule to
detect our common availability, initiate a conference call, and receive
a signal from us that tells it to proceed. But the alternative that we
constantly endure is arguably worse. BlueNote's product can't do all
of this yet. Even if it could, VoIP infrastructure isn't deployed
widely enough and isn't interoperable enough to make this kind of
scenario routine. But the vision of a common framework for process-to-
, process-to-human, and human-to-human communication is compelling.
The genius of REST (Representational State Transfer) is that it's a
mode of communication equally accessible to programs and humans. To
software, a URL is a method call. To a person, it's a bookmark that
can be saved, traded, and tagged. VoIP/SOA convergence aims for a
similar kind of duality.
Flapjax Simplifies AJAX Development
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
Researchers at Brown University have created a new programming language
for developing Web applications, known as Flapjax. Flapjax is a new
twist on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) style development that
is based on JavaScript, said Shriram Krishnamurthi, a computer science
professor at Brown who is leading the project. Krishnamurthi said
Flapjax has six primary characteristics: It is event-driven and
reactive; it reduces unnecessary code through its template system; it
provides a persistent store that automatically updates all clients
sharing the same data; it enables sharing of data with others; it
implements access control to channel the data sharing; and it libraries
to connect to external Web sites, which enables the creation of client-
side mashups. Krishnamurthi and the core team of Flapjax developers
released the technology under the BSD open-source license. The Flapjax
Team, which has copyrighted the name, includes Krishnamurthi, Leo
Meyerovich, Michael Greenberg, Gregory Cooper, and Aleks Bromfield.
Developers can look at Flapjax in one of two ways: (1) The technology
can be adopted as a new language that shares the syntax of JavaScript
but makes it more natural to write interactive applications. (2) Or,
some developers might just use Flapjax as a JavaScript library that
offers some help in making interactive applications. So, even a person
who doesn't want to use the Flapjax-to-JavaScript compiler can still
use the features of JavaScript — they would just need to write more
code by hand.
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