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XML and Web Services In The News - 23 October 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by IBM Corporation
HEADLINES:
Microsoft Releases Beta of Atlas AJAX Tool
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
Microsoft has the first beta of its AJAX tool, ASP.Net AJAX, formerly
known as Atlas, making it available under three download options.
The first option is the ASP.Net AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)
v1.0 "Core" download, which contains the features that will be supported
by Microsoft Product Support and includes support for the core AJAX
type system, networking stack, component model, extender base classes
and the server-side functionality to integrate within ASP.Net, said
Scott Guthrie, a general manager in the Microsoft Developer Division,
in a blog post on October 20, 2006. The second option is the ASP.Net
AJAX "Value-Add" download, which contains additional higher-level
features that were in previous CTPs (Community Technology Previews) of
Atlas, but which won't be in the fully supported 1.0 Core version, he
said. The third option is the ASP.Net AJAX Control Toolkit, which
contains 28 free, AJAX-enabled controls that are built on top of the
ASP.Net AJAX 1.0 Core download. This effort is a collaborative shared-
source project built by a combination of Microsoft and non-Microsoft
developers. It is available via download on Microsoft's CodePlex
community source site. The new Atlas beta also features enhanced
support for the Safari browser. "Previous ASP.Net AJAX CTPs didn't
have great support for Safari," Guthrie said in his blog. "With this
Beta, we have added Safari as a fully tested and supported browser.
We are currently working on adding Opera support as well." In addition,
the new beta features enhanced debugging support.
Call for Participation: Web of Services for Enterprise Computing
Staff, W3C Announcement
W3C has issued a Call for Participation in connection with a "Workshop
on Web of Services for Enterprise Computing," to be held February 27-28,
2007 at MITRE Corporation in Bedford, MA, USA. The aim of this Workshop
is to gather interested parties to discuss and provide recommendations
to W3C regarding the best approaches to facilitate the processing of
business transactions and interactions with systems that pre-date the
Web, and address the need to interconnect intranet and/or extranet
services using Web technologies. The Workshop's goals are part of the
mission of the W3C mission to improve the Web of documents, data, and
services. The Web of documents is an unquestioned success, but is it
either the same or sufficient for the Web of services, which has not
yet fulfilled its original vision as a solution for Web enabled business
processes. Participants will discuss how to facilitate the processing
of business transactions and interactions with systems that pre-date
the Web, and to address the need to interconnect intranet and/or
extranet services using Web technologies. Position papers are required
in order to participate in this Workshop. The intent is to make sure
that participants have an active interest in the area, and that the
Workshop will benefit from their presence. The authors of accepted
papers will be allowed to send two participants to the Workshop. A set
of papers selected by the Program Committee will also be presented
during the Workshop. The position paper should address the questions:
(1) What are the use cases and examples that identify gaps in the
current Web architecture and related specifications? (2) What
requirements can be derived for work to address these gaps? Although
the Workshop is public, it is restricted to 60 places, and registration
is required for all attendees.
See also: the W3C announcement
AmberPoint Improves SOA Policy Execution
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
The next release of the AmberPoint SOA Management System decouples
policy enforcement from the agents that have executed these policies,
letting third-party systems such as enterprise service buses execute
policies. This approach can improve performance and reliability,
AmberPoint said. Version 5.1 of AmberPoint's Web services and SOA
management platform, being announced Monday, will feature this
revision, which the company describes as agentless SOA runtime
governance. The architectural change allows users to delegate policy
execution to their own devices or software. Agents still can be used
where the agentless scenario is not applicable, such as where it is
precluded by limitations of a platform. Also being unveiled as part
of the Version 5.1 moniker and featuring the agentless technology is
AmberPoint SOA Validation System, for validating SOA performance and
functionality. "What's happening or is starting to happen is that
more and more of the infrastructure, of the SOA infrastructure, has
the ability to do some of the work directly," said Ed Horst, AmberPoint
vice president of marketing. With the new approach, users can
administer an SOA without having to set up each piece individually to
function with AmberPoint. For starters, AmberPoint is revealing that
the F5 Networks Big-IP device for load balancing of IP addresses and
the Iona Artix ESB can take advantage of the new architecture. Other
products with this capability will be announced in the future, in the
appliance, application server, and ESB categories.
Mashups: The New Breed of Web Application
Duane Merrill, IBM developerWorks
Mashups are an exciting genre of interactive Web applications that draw
upon content retrieved from external data sources to create entirely
new and innovative services. They are a hallmark of the second
generation of Web applications informally known as Web 2.0. This
introductory article explores what it means to be a mashup, the
different classes of popular mashups constructed today, and the
enabling technologies that mashup developers leverage to create their
applications. Prominent mashup genres include: [1] Mapping mashups —
developers mash all sorts of data (everything from nuclear disasters
to Boston's CowParade cows) onto maps. Not to be left out, APIs from
Microsoft (Virtual Earth), Yahoo (Yahoo Maps), and AOL (MapQuest)
shortly followed. [2] Video and photo mashups — for example, a mashup
might analyze song or poetry lyrics and create a mosaic or collage of
relevant photos, or display social networking graphs based upon common
photo metadata (subject, timestamp, and other metadata). [3] Search and
shopping mashups — To facilitate mashups and other interesting Web
applications, consumer marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon have
released APIs for programmatically accessing their content. [4] News
mashups — Syndication feed mashups can aggregate a user's feeds and
present them over the Web, creating a personalized newspaper that caters
to the reader's particular interests. A mashup application is
architecturally comprised of three different participants that are
logically and physically disjoint: (1) The API/content providers.
These are the [sometimes unwitting] providers of the content being
mashed. (2) The mashup site. On one hand, mashups can be implemented
similarly to traditional Web applications using server-side dynamic
content generation technologies like Java servlets, CGI, PHP or ASP;
alternatively, mashed content can be generated directly within the
client's browser through client-side scripting (that is, JavaScript)
or applets. This client-side logic is often the combination of code
directly embedded in the mashup's Web pages as well as scripting API
libraries or applets (furnished by the content providers) referenced
by these Web pages. (3) The client's Web browser: this is where the
application is rendered graphically and where user interaction takes
place. Mashups often use client-side logic to assemble and compose
the mashed content.
Google Earth Application Gets the Vote
Juan Carlos Perez, InfoWorld
Google has assembled a wealth of information about the upcoming U.S.
general election and will display links to it on its Google Earth
mapping application. Google Earth users will see stars on the U.S.
map wherever there is a race in the November 7 [2006] election. A
number of congressional seats and state governorships are up for grabs.
Clicking on a star opens up a bubble with information about races in
that area and links to a variety of information resources, like the
Web sites for the U.S. Federal Election Commission and the Center for
Responsive Politics's OpenSecrets.org, which gathers information about
campaign contributions. Below each candidate are links that trigger
Google Web, image and news searches about them. This is the first time
Google has created an overlay of election-related links on Google Earth,
and the company hasn't decided whether it will do this for every major
election in the future, Hanke said. Google Earth, one of the company's
most popular products, is a free, downloadable application that taps
into a massive database of satellite images and related information.
Its video game-like interface lets users "fly" around the globe,
zooming in and out of cities. Google provides a variety of information
overlays for the application, so users can display roads, borders,
geographic features, restaurants, parks and hotels, to mention just a
few of the options.
New Tools for Finding Data and Documents Quickly
Steven J. Schuchart Jr., InformationWeek
There's been a lot of buzz in legal circles recently about United States
v. KPMG. Vendors are touting content-addressed storage, or CAS, as a
way to make discovery requests more manageable. In a nutshell, a CAS
system locates data by an array-assigned address, rather than by
physical address or directory. Since the CAS device completely abstracts
data from the hardware on which it resides, documents can be found based
on content, rather than by storage location. A CAS system comprises
storage nodes, where data is physically kept, and access nodes, where
metadata and information on the data's location on the storage nodes are
kept. CAS can cut down on duplication, and thus storage space
requirements. A document with even a small change will be saved
separately from the original copy, providing digital fingerprinting and
versioned storage. Some vendors use this capability to keep only one
copy of a given data set, removing the duplicates usually found on
standard location-addressed storage. The story isn't all positive: Many
CAS devices have significant shortcomings. For example, metadata
standardization is nonexistent. The Storage Networking Industry
Association is creating a standard that will allow for the migration
of XML-based metadata between different CAS systems, but those efforts
are incomplete. Keep an eye on SNIA and ask your vendors about plans
to implement eventual CAS standards.
New W3C Markup Validator Web Service API
Staff, W3C Announcement
W3C has announced an update for its W3C Markup Validation Service and
Link Checker, including bug fixes, new documentation, and usability
improvements, and a new Validator API for developers. The Markup
Validator Web Service API provides a SOAP 1.2 validation interface:
when called with parameter 'output=soap12', the validator will switch
to its SOAP 1.2 interface. Along with W3C's other Web Quality Tools,
the Markup Validator and Link Checker are developed as open source
software with the participation of volunteers and support of a large
community, and are among W3C's most popular and useful resources.
See also: the W3C news item
When Standards Are Political: ODF (the Open Document Format)
James Love, Blog
Yesterday I attended a meeting hosted by TACD at Harvard's Berkman
Center about a very important issue, one that is both highly technical
and political at the same time: the battle over the Open Document Format
(ODF). The technical part concerns what ODF is — an open specification
for the formats of common documents such as those created by word
processors, spreadsheets and presentation graphics programs. The
political part concerns what ODF represents: an end to the Microsoft
monopoly in desktop applications that are used to author and manage
these documents. Estimates vary, but Microsoft probably controls
somewhere between 90 to 95 percent of the market for word processing,
spreadsheet and presentation graphics programs. This means people use
Microsoft software to create these documents, and also to store data.
The source of Microsoft's monopoly is control over file formats, in a
world where data needs to be shared. Lots of companies or even free
software communities can create software to do these common tasks.
Corel's WordPerfect office suite, Apple's iWorks, the OpenOffice.Org,
and doc.google.com are just a few examples of "competitors" to Microsoft
e data. With everyone using email and the web, we need to consider if
others can read our documents, and if we can read what we receive from
others.
See also: User Perspectives on ODF
Analysis: Keep Up With the Trends Changing Data Management
David Stodder, Intelligent Enterprise Magazine
Relentless: that's the best way to describe the pressure database
managers feel as they try to satisfy information-hungry enterprises.
Business intelligence and data warehousing systems are moving toward
real time, putting more demands on query performance. Enterprise
applications and process management systems are coming to market with
embedded analytics and activity monitoring that need data to thrive.
Search engines and XML, while offering promising ways to find and
exchange information, also threaten to crack open carefully designed
schemas and produce data cacophony. We look at two key underlying
developments that are shaping how data management will support service-
oriented enterprise applications, BI and process-oriented, embedded
analytics. One is XML's establishment in the database engine and the
emergence of grid-based consolidation. In a second article, Richard
Winter and Rick Burns focus on scalability challenges with data
warehouse systems.
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