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XML and Web Services In The News - 27 October 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by IBM Corporation
HEADLINES:
Where ODF Stands in the EU
Tom Chance, NewsForge
A battle over Open Document Format (ODF) and the treatment of open
standards is taking place deep in the bureaucracy of the European
Commission. The information came to light during aKademy, the KDE world
summit, in Dublin last month. A key presentation on the ODF day came
from Dr. Barbara Held, who is the Enterprise and Industry Directorate-
General of the European Commission Program for Interoperable Delivery of
pan-European eGovernment Services to Public Administrations, Businesses
and Citizens (IDABC). The existence of multiple, incompatible file
formats poses a formidable problem for the EU, so the IDABC was tasked
with developing a strategy to overcome this... Held said in her talk
that "in the view of the European administrations and Member States, the
ODF standard is at the very top of the pile by far from all other
proposed open standards." So why not just recommend ODF? Held said she
was unable to comment officially on the matter, but she did explain the
general reasoning that led to this decision. To begin with, the legal
definition of an open standard in the EU excludes those controlled by
industry consortia; ODF is controlled by the OASIS consortium. The EU
only recognises standards published by international bodies such as the
ISO and the IEC. Whilst version 1.0 of the ODF was accepted as an ISO
standard in May 2006, subsequent versions need to be resubmitted, and it
is unlikely that this will happen again until the release of version 1.2
in 2008. The second problem is that the intellectual property models of
European standardisation bodies and key players usually include RAND,
which makes them incompatible with the stipulations of the EIF. The
Commission must remain neutral between competing international standards.
Whilst member states and EU bodies can certainly discriminate between
such standards, the EU itself cannot embed such a decision in a European
requirement to use, for example, ODF rather than Microsoft's OOXML. The
background of this neutrality is fair competition, which is found in
directive 98/34. This directive may be revised, since this is such a hot
topic at the moment, so there is room to overcome this barrier to ODF
becoming the official format of the EU.
See also: ODF references
Sun Open-Source Portal Initiative: Portlet Repository
Jeffrey Blattman, Navaneeth Krishnan (et al.), Sun Developer Network
This article defines portlets and portals and discusses the Open Source
Portlet Repository (Portlet Repository for short), a new java.net
project dedicated to the free and open exchange of portlets. It also
explains the Portlet Repository goals, scope, and content and summarizes
the guidelines for contributors. Portlets are reusable Web components
for building portals. Classic examples are My Yahoo! and, more recently,
Google's IG customized home-page service. The "windows" you see on
those pages are portlets. Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 is
version 1.0 of the portlet specification, the standard that enables
portlet portability. Before JSR 168 came into play, there were numerous
noninteroperating definitions of a portlet. The term portlet had only
a conceptual meaning. JSR 168, developed by an expert group with
representatives from many industry and open-source leaders, including
Apache, BEA, IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, defines a set of Java
APIs for portal development and standardizes portlet preferences, user
information, and life cycle. The Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP)
specification enables portlets to be exposed as Web services and
consumed by remote portals. Even though WSRP does not assume or depend
on a portlet container, WSRP and the portlet container complement each
other as a result of close alignment between their specifications.
The heart of a portal is a portlet container, which is to portlets
what a servlet container is to servlets. Portlet containers execute
portlets and manage their life cycle. Additionally, portals offer an
aggregation metaphor — a mechanism with which you can arrange multiple
portlets on a single page. The Portlet Repository forms a portlet
library, where portal developers can choose from a wide variety of
content and services for their portals.
See also: Mashup Portlets
Real Web 2.0: Bookmarks? Tagging? Delicious!
Uche Ogbuji, IBM developerWorks
When people list classic Web 2.0 sites, one that never fails to come
up is del.icio.us. This site, despite its relative youth, is the
best established social bookmarking site. It allows people to post
links and add tags to those links. It provides Web feeds for link
collections, including automatically aggregated tags such as the
special popular tag, for links that have been posted by many users.
It provides a simple and open API. This article shows how to work
with del.icio.us, one of the classic Web 2.0 sites, using Web XML
feeds and JSON, in Python and ECMAScript. When you think of Web 2.0
technology, you might think of the latest Ajax tricks, but that is
just a small part of the picture. More fundamental concerns are open
data, simple APIs, and features that encourage users to form social
networks. These are also what make Web 2.0 a compelling problem for
Web architects. The combination of open, flexible Web APIs and content
uploaded by users and maintained in user networks is the true 2.0 of
Web 2.0. The Internet and its users are migrating from a Web of
tightly-controlled traffic flowing one way from publishers to readers,
to a Web of information managed as a collaboration between the
publisher and its community of users.
On Linking Alternative Representations to Enable Discovery and Publishing
T. V. Raman (ed), Draft TAG Finding
W3C has released an updated version of the (draft) TAG Finding "On
Linking Alternative Representations to Enable Discovery and Publishing."
There has always been a need to serve user-agent specific content for a
given URI — thus highlighting the distinction between Resource and
Representation on the Web. The increasing importance of the mobile,
multilingual Web makes this requirement even stronger. At the same
time, published content (and its various representations) needs to be
discoverable on the Web; as an example, crawlers and web-bots need to
be able to discover the availability of alternative forms of a given
resource. Documents published on the Web become discoverable via the
hyperlinked structure of the Web; to enable discovery of alternative
representations, the relation between these multiple representations
needs to be captured by the hyperlink structure of the Web. Candidate
use case scenarios are presented, along with accompanying issues and
suggested solutions. For example, content owners would like to publish
their content to a wide variety of end-user devices ranging from
desktop Web browsers to mobile devices such as cell-phones and PDAs.
They also serve multiple geographies using different languages. They
know about the different markup language variants that are currently in
vogue on these devices, and are capable of generating the representation
that is most appropriate for the accessing user-agent. This TAG Finding
proposes a sequence of best practices to foster the following long-term
goals: (1) Preserve a Single Web i.e., a Web where content is
universally accessible from a variety of end-user devices; (2) Ensure
that the One Web enables the easy exchange of resources and pointers to
resources across its different facets, i.e., mobile and desktop; (3)
Ensure that contents published to a given facet of the Web are linkable,
discoverable, crawlable, searchable and browsable from any of its other
facets; (4) Enable content providers clearly advertise the relationship
between a given generic resource and the various specific resources
that correspond to the available alternatives for that generic resource.
Mounting Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) Servers
Julian Reschke (ed), IETF Network Working Group RFC
The IETF RFC Editor announced that a new Informational RFC on WebDAV
is now available in online RFC libraries. The Request for Comments #4709
defines a mime type 'davmount+xml'. By definition, a Web Distributed
Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) server (RFC 2518) is an HTTP server
as well. Most WebDAV servers can be (at least partly) operated from an
HTML-based user interface in a web browser. However, it is frequently
desirable to be able to switch from an HTML-based view to a presentation
provided by a native WebDAV client, directly supporting the authoring
features defined in WebDAV and related specifications. For example,
many educational institutions use WebDAV servers as a mechanism for
sharing documents among students. Each student owns a separate
collection structure on a WebDAV server, often called his/ her "locker".
Ideally, when users click on a link in an HTML page provided by the
university (perhaps by their university Web portal), an editable view
of their locker will appear. In current Web browsers, there is no
uniform way to specify that a user clicking on a link will be presented
with an editable view of a Web Distinguished Authoring and Versioning
(WebDAV) server. This document specifies a mechanism and a document
format that enables WebDAV servers to send "mounting" information to a
WebDAV client. The mechanism is designed to work on any platform and
with any combination of browser and WebDAV client, relying solely on
the well-understood dispatch of documents through their MIME type. A
WebDAV mount request is encoded in a specific XML format with a well-
defined MIME type. The MIME type allows user agents to dispatch the
content to a handler specific to the system's WebDAV client.
See also: WebDAV Resources
Sneak Preview: VoiceXML 3.0
Jim Barnett (et al., eds), W3C Presentation
The next major version of VoiceXML (VoiceXML 3.0) is expected to be
published in an initial W3C working draft in 2007. Its design is driven
by external and internal requirements: addressing unresolved issues
from VoiceXML 2.0/2.1, recognizing that VoiceXML is being used in new
ways (e.g. multimodal) and in other languages. Its purpose is to
provide powerful dialog capabilities that can be used to build advanced
speech applications, and to provide these capabilities in a form that
can be easily and cleanly integrated with other W3C languages. It will
provide enhancements to existing dialog and media control, as well as
major new features (e.g. modularization, a cleaner separation between
data/flow/dialog, and asynchronous external eventing) to facilitate
interoperation with external applications and media components. VoiceXML
3.0 is being developed by the W3C Voice Browser Working Group (VBWG),
which is one of the largest W3C groups (some 95 group participants, and
38 organizations). This presentation is based upon slides presented at
SpeechTEK (August 2006), with contributions from Jim Barnett, Emily
Candell, Jerry Carter, Rafah Hosn, and Scott McGlashan. It covers the
Data Flow Presentation (DFP) Application Framework, Overview of
Flow/SCXML, Overview of the Data Model, The VoiceXML 3.0 specification
development process, Modularization, New media features, Recording and
media control, EMMA. SCXML ["State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine
Notation for Control Abstraction"] is designed as a Dialog Flow Language
(State Machine Language) based on Harel State Charts, with a few
dialog-specific extensions.
See also: on SCXML
NetBeans: Interview with Tim Cramer
Joe Winchester, Java Developer's Journal
This article presents excerpts of an interview with Tim Cramer,
executive director of Java tools at Sun. "NetBeans 5.0 delivered a lot
of new features that blew the Java developer away: the GUI Builder
formerly known as Project Matisse, the code-aware collaboration tools,
the NetBeans Profiler, and Web framework support. The NetBeans IDE
already provides for easy creation of Web Services, so it's a natural
progression to allow for developers to quickly orchestrate them
together. To that end, we've showcased in the NetBeans 5.5. Enterprise
Pack preview a BPEL-based orchestration designer to develop the BPEL
process orchestration and provided a BPEL runtime to deploy and test.
In developing these Web Services we quickly realized that one of the
biggest pain points for an enterprise team is XML document creation
and manipulation. If we took into account that a real-world XML schema
can potentially be as large as 17K lines of code then it becomes self-
evident that a lot of time is spent in creating the schema and getting
it right. Therefore it's imperative for a development environment to
have the right XML tooling to improve productivity. The NetBeans 5.5
Enterprise Pack preview showcases an XML editor and graphical XML
document analysis with built-in queries that allow for easy schema
creation and debugging."
See also: the Netbeans web site
Authentication the Message for Next Round in Spam Fight
Mike Barton and Elizabeth Montalbano, InfoWorld
E-mail filters have become effective at preserving our in-boxes, creating
the illusion that spam has been tamed. But the bulk of spam is growing.
MessageLabs said about 70 percent of all e-mail traffic as of this week,
and 66 percent this year, was bogus. Although junk- and malware-laden
messages have been pushed out of sight for many computer users, they
are not out of mind for those minding e-mail delivery systems, who say
tackling the growing problem demands an answer to the simple question:
Who's e-mailing? That's what Microsoft and Sendmail say must be answered
if businesses are to save e-mail from having its 'killer app' status
redesignated. Last week, Microsoft added its specification to a list of
free and open specifications for developers, and on Wednesday, Sendmail
outlined the related rollout of its Trusted Unified Messaging Platform.
Sender ID, developed by Microsoft, Sendmail, and others, allows
companies to attach information to an Internet domain that tells e-mail
recipients what addresses are authorized to send mail from that domain.
This allows the system that receives a message whether it is legitimate.
Sendmail's Trusted Unified Messaging Platform will go further with a
system called DomainKeys, which uses public/private key cryptography to
generate a unique signature for each e-mail address based on information
in the message header. The system requires senders to deploy a PKI
infrastructure, but makes it possible to authenticate both the source
of the message and the message content.
RFID Passports Take Off
Joris Evers, CNET News.com
Except for Andorra, Brunei and Liechtenstein, all of the 27 countries
whose citizens can travel to the U.S. without a visa are now issuing
"e-Passports," the department said in a statement. The passports include
a radio frequency identification, or RFID, chip with the holder's
information and a biometric identifier, such as a digital photograph.
The new passports are designed to be harder to forge and to identify
the bearer more securely. "The upgrade to e-Passports is a significant
advance in preventing terrorists from using lost or stolen passports
to obtain entry into the United States," DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff
said in the statement. The U.S. government has pushed for the electronic
passport for the past two years and recently started producing them
itself. The deadline for all the countries in the Visa Waiver Program
to start issuing passports with RFID chips was October 26, 2006. RFID
tags are being included in passports despite concerns about the holder's
privacy and security. The U.S. government has repeatedly dismissed the
security and privacy concerns. The passports "have critical security
features which prevent the unauthorized reading of data stored on the
chip," the Department of Homeland Security said Thursday.
See also: RFID resources
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