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XML and Web Services In The News - 1 November 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
Reinventing HTML
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Blog
Making standards is hard work. Its hard because it involves listening
to other people and figuring out what they mean, which means figuring
out where they are coming from, how they are using words, and so on. A
particular case is HTML. HTML has the potential interest of millions of
people: anyone who has designed a web page may have useful views on new
HTML features. It is the earliest spec of W3C, a battleground of the
browser wars, and now the most widespread spec... Some things are
clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML
incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including
quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces
all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move,
largely because the browsers didn't complain. Some large communities did
shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all.
It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a
transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world.
The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous
one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML,
as also in parallel xHTML. It will have a different chair and staff
contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML together. We have strong support
for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser
makers. There will also be work on forms. This is a complex area, as
existing HTML forms and XForms are both form languages. HTML forms are
ubiquitously deployed, and there are many implementations and users of
XForms. Meanwhile, the Webforms submission has suggested sensible
extensions to HTML forms. The plan is, informed by Webforms, to extend
HTML forms. At the same time, there is a work item to look at how HTML
forms (existing and extended) can be thought of as XForm equivalents,
to allow an easy escalation path. A goal would be to have an HTML forms
language which is a superset of the existing HTML language, and a subset
of a XForms language wit added HTML compatibility.
See also: Norm Walsh's blog
PHP Event: Open Source Accommodation Emphasized
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Panelists representing companies such as Microsoft, Sun Microsystems,
IBM, and Oracle were queried at the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo on
Tuesday about commercial involvement in the open source arena. "It
seems to us from where we sit that there's really no choice," said
Tim Bray, a Web -oriented generalist at Sun and a co-inventor of XML.
"A substantial portion of the market has made it clear with their
wallets that they want to deploy and run open source software." "We
can't go back. It's too late," Bray said. The business model around
open source is monetizing at the point of value, when users are ready
to go into production; this is easier to understand and more satisfying
to users than writing big checks for software licenses, Bray said.
Generation of revenues in the open source market largely has involved
selling customer support services while offering the software itself
for free. An IBM official added that innovation, which had occurred
at the university and vendor levels, now is happening in the open
community at large. Panelists also touched on the actual subject listed
for the session: software stacks. This sparked some sharp disagreements
over how easy it is to switch software platforms. The LAMP (Linux Apache
MySQL Perl/PHP/Python) stack, said panelist Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL,
provides a heterogeneous platform that evolves on its own. Bray added
that the LAMP stack is pretty swappable. Touching on the topic of
programming languages, Bray stressed that no language will dominate
anymore, not Java, PHP or Rails.
Zend Moves to Boost PHP Usage
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
Zend Technologies has announced a series of agreements with major
technology companies aimed at growing the market for its PHP platform
and for the use of the PHP scripting language in general. At its
Zend/PHP Conference in San Jose, California, on October 31, 2006, Zend
officials announced that the company will be working with several
companies, such as Google, IBM, MySQL and including some less expected
companies, such as Microsoft, to promote the use of PHP as a Web
development platform. Moreover, while Microsoft has been working
internally to make it easier to run dynamic or scripting languages
on .Net, the new agreement with Zend extends the efforts to support
these languages. Zend announced a technical collaboration with Microsoft
to enhance the experience of running the PHP scripting language on
Windows Server 2003 and the next version of Windows Server, code-named
Longhorn server. Meanwhile, at the conference, Zend officials shared
details of new and updated products for creating the next generation of
Web applications, and also demonstrated its commitment to the
development of the open-source projects Zend Framework and PHP Eclipse
Project by showcasing new milestones in the projects. Zend also
announced Zend Studio 5.5, an update to Zend Core for IBM that makes
it compatible with the latest version of DB2 and adds support for the
IDS (Informix Dynamic Server); and a new product called ZendBox, a
fully hosted and managed PHP 5 Technology stack. Also at the conference,
Zend announced its update to Zend Core for IBM, which implements support
for IBM's DB2 Version 9 and IDS (Informix Dynamic Server) 10. DB2 9 is
a leading edge hybrid data server capable of supporting both relational
and pureXML storage. New features increase performance and scalability
for both XML and relational data.
DSDL Part 7: Character Repertoire Description Language
MURATA Makoto et al. (eds), ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 1 Draft
Members of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 1 have released an updated (draft)
version of "Document Schema Definition Languages (DSDL) — Part 7:
Character Repertoire Description Language." This part of ISO/IEC 19757
provides a language for describing collections of characters defined
in ISO/IEC 10646 or Unicode or default grapheme clusters defined in
UAX#29. Descriptions in this language may be referenced from schemas.
Furthermore, they may also be referenced from forms and stylesheets.
Descriptions of collections need not to be exact. To provide non-exact
descriptions, this part of ISO/IEC 19757 provides kernels and hulls,
which provide the lower limit and upper limits, respectively. Clause
5 introduces kernels and hulls of collections. Clause 6 shows how
Unicode regular expression can be used to describe permissible
characters and default grapheme characters. Clause 7 describes the
syntax of CRDL schemas. Clause 8 describes the semantics of a correct
CRDL schema; the semantics specify when a character is contained by
a collection described by a CRDL schema.Clause 9 describes modes of
CRDL validators. The 19757 [draft, in-progress] Standard defines a
set of Document Schema Definition Languages (DSDL) that can be used
to specify one or more validation processes performed against
Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents. A number of validation
technologies are standardized in DSDL to complement those already
available as standards or from industry. The main objective of this
International Standard is to bring together different validation-related
technologies to form a single extensible framework that allows
technologies to work in series or in parallel to produce a single or
a set of validation results. The extensibility of DSDL accommodates
validation technologies not yet designed or specified.
See also: the posting
Sun Finalizes Open-Source Java Plans
China Martens, InfoWorld
Sun Microsystems is gradually providing more details on how it plans
to open source its core Java technology, delivering on a promise the
company made to developers back in May at its JavaOne conference. The
vendor intends to make both Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE)
and Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME) freely available in "the
November time frame," Peder Ulander, vice president of software
marketing at Sun, said in an interview Tuesday. An open-source
development initiative for building an application server based on the
third member of the Java family, Java Platform Enterprise Edition
(Java EE), has been under way since June 2005 under the name Project
GlassFish. Sun intends to open source three main components of,
respectively, Java SE and of Java ME, Ulander said. For Java SE, the
pieces are Java Compiler, JavaHelp and the Java HotSpot virtual machine.
For Java ME, the components are the Connected Limited Device
Configuration (CLDC) stack, the Connected Device Configuration (CBC)
and the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) 2.1. Motorola announced
Tuesday its plans to establish a Java ME open-source community for the
mobile devices industry, voicing a hope to stem the fragmentation of
the Java mobile platform. Once Sun has open sourced Java, the company
will have made 70 percent of its entire software portfolio freely
available, Ulander said. Sun "is still on track" to open source all
its software within 12 months, he added, with the remaining 30 percent
consisting of the vendor's SOA (service-oriented architecture) suite
and its identity management software. "We're already down that path,"
Ulander said to open source both the SOA and ID offerings since Sun
has previously made both its business process execution language
(BPEL) engine and its single sign-on technology freely available.
JSONic Thoughts
Kurt Cagle, O'Reilly Technical Articles
I've been giving a lot of thought lately to JSON and JavaScript in
particular. For those in the XML community not familiar with it, JSON
was largely the invention of Douglas Crockford, a JavaScript expert
who currently works as an architect for Yahoo! and who I had the
privilege of meeting at the recent AJAXWorld conference. The idea
behind JSON is surprisingly simple, and like many simple ideas, is
also remarkably powerful. Dissatisfied with the complexity involved
with using XML as a data format for seemingly lightweight tasks,
Crockford asked one of those questions that causes all kinds of
interesting repercussions: "Why couldn't we use the native data format
of the JavaScript, the associative array, as a vehicle for transferring
content between client and server, instead of XML?" A typical object in
JavaScript actually has a number of traits that make it particularly
suitable to this task. It is late-bound, which means that any JavaScript
entity consists of one of a handful of primitive types — number,
string, arrays, objects, dates and e4X entities (the latter only with
Mozilla and Flash at this stage). Moreover, the combination of a
handful of primitive types, associative arrays and linear arrays can
effectively represent most data structures used in programming —
something which XML developers realized some time ago. Ultimately,
in evaluating these two technologies you should understand that both
XML structures and JSON entities are declarative structures (at least
to the point where you start introducting serialized functions) — in
essence, JSON can be seen as a variant of XML that replaces the angle
brackets with curly braces and that doesn't recognize (explicitly) the
notion of attributes, although you can certainly use conventions to
mimic this. I suspect that as ECMAScript for XML becomes more pervasive
in the desktop environment, you will see some interesting struggles
back and forth as to which of the two formats will become dominant,
but that struggle is still a few years in the future.
New Packaging Standard for eBooks
Staff, TheBookStandard.com
The International Digital Publishing Forum, the standards and trade
association for digital publishing, announced today the release of a
new technical standard to facilitate digital content creation,
distribution and use by consumers. In addition to the Open eBook
Publication Structure (OEBPS), an XML standard for authoring digital
books, the IDPF has now released a new standard for packaging a digital
publication, including the contents of the publication, metadata,
signatures, encryption, rights and other information into one standard
file. Entitled the Open eBook Publication Structure Container Format
(OCF), the new IDPF standard will allow publishers to release a single
standard file into their sales and distribution channels and will also
enable consumers to exchange unencrypted eBooks and other digital
publications between reading systems that support the new standard.
The standard specifies a ZIP-based packaging format that is an
extension of OASIS' Open Document Format Standard. The OCF specification
and additional information can be found online. More than forty
publishers, technology companies and organizations were involved in
the OCF Working Group, the committee responsible for the creation of
the standard. Companies including Adobe, eBook Technologies, Inc.,
Mobipocket and OSoft have already announced plans to implement the
new OCF standard.
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