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XML and Web Services In The News - 3 November 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
WS-I Basic Profile Version 1.2
Keith Ballinger, David Ehnebuske, Chris Ferris et al. (eds)
The Web Services-Interoperability Organization (WS-I) has released a
first public Working Group Draft for "Basic Profile Version 1.2."
WS-I Basic Profile 1.2 consists of a set of non-proprietary Web services
specifications, along with clarifications, refinements, interpretations
and amplifications of those specifications which promote
interoperability. The v1.2 Profile is derived from the Basic Profile
1.1 by incorporating any errata to date and including those requirements
related to the serialization of envelopes and their representation in
messages from the Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0. The v1.2 Profile
is not intended to be composed with the Simple SOAP Binding Profile 1.0.
The Attachments Profile 1.0 adds support for SOAP with Attachments,
and is intended to be used in combination with this Profile. There are
a few requirements in the Basic Profile 1.2 that may present
compatibility issues with clients, services and their artifacts that
have been engineered for Basic Profile 1.1 conformance. However, in
general, the Basic Profile WG members have tried to preserve as much
forwards and backwards compatibility with the Basic Profile 1.1 as
possible so as not to disenfranchise clients, services and their
artifacts that have been deployed in conformance with the Basic Profile
1.1. [Note: Chris Ferris mention that "The WG is nearly done with this
work, but we invite the public to comment on the initial draft.
Those comments will, of course, be incorporated into the follow-on
drafts. However, the WG is driving towards a WGAD (Working Group
Approval Draft) later this month.]
See also: Chris Ferris' blog
Certeon Confronts Challenges of Open XML
Paula Musich, eWEEK
Microsoft's new open XML file format could take the wind out of the
sails of application acceleration vendors thanks to the compression it
adds to those files. One new startup in the fast maturing market is
working to exploit that. Certeon on Nov. 6 will release its new S-Series
application acceleration blueprints for Microsoft Office 2007,
SharePoint 2007 and Exchange 2003 and 2007, which company officials
claim are unique in their ability to handle the new open XML files.
The new blueprints, which work with Certeon's S-Series application
acceleration appliances that optimize traffic flowing between remote
branch offices and data centers, can unzip compressed files from those
applications and identify objects in the files to see what's changed.
Only new information is sent across the WAN that hasn't already been
stored locally on an appliance at the remote site, according to [Gareth]
Taube. The Certeon appliances are preloaded with individual application
acceleration blueprints. In addition to the new blueprints, Certeon
provides blueprints for Microsoft Office 2003, Sharepoint 2003,
Oracle's eBusiness suite and for HTTP and HTTPS streams. The 2007
versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint all use the new open
XML file format.
Candidate Recommendation: Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 1.0
Christian Lieske and Felix Sasaki (eds), W3C Technical Report
W3C has announced the advancement of the "Internationalization Tag Set
(ITS) Version 1.0" specification to the level of Candidate Recommendation.
Organized by data categories, the ITS set of elements and attributes
supports the internationalization and localization of schemas and
documents. Implementations are provided for DTDs, XML Schema and Relax NG,
and can be used with new or existing vocabularies like XHTML, DocBook,
and OpenDocument. The increasing usage of XML as a medium for
documentation-related content (e.g. DocBook and DITA as formats for
writing structured documentation, well suited to computer hardware and
software manuals) and software-related content (e.g. the Extensible User
Interface Language [XUL]) creates challenges and opportunities in the
domain of XML internationalization and localization. Content or software
that is authored in one language (so-called source language) is often
made available in additional languages or adapted with regard to other
cultural aspects. This is done through a process called localization,
where the original material is translated and adapted to the target
audience. In addition, document formats expressed by schemas may be
used by people in different parts of the world, and these people may
need special markup to support the local language or script. For example,
people authoring in languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian or Urdu
need special markup to specify directionality in mixed direction text.
From the viewpoints of feasibility, cost, and efficiency, it is
important that the original material should be suitable for localization.
This is achieved by appropriate design and development, and the
corresponding process is referred to as internationalization. The ITS
Working Group expects to request that the Director advance this document
to Proposed Recommendation once the Working Group has demonstrated
implementations for key conformance clauses. Comments are welcome
through 10-December-2006.
See also: W3C Internationalization (I18n) Activity
Southampton and MIT Launch Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI)
Staff, AWSRI Announcement
The University of Southampton and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology have announced the launch of a long-term research
collaboration that aims to produce the fundamental scientific advances
necessary to guide the future design and use of the World Wide Web. The
Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) will generate a research agenda
for understanding the scientific, technical and social challenges
underlying the growth of the Web. Of particular interest is the volume
of information on the Web that documents more and more aspects of human
activity and knowledge. WSRI research projects will weigh such questions
as, how do we access information and assess its reliability? By what
means may we assure its use complies with social and legal rules? How
will we preserve the Web over time? The joint MIT-Southampton
initiative will provide a global forum for scientists and scholars to
collaborate on the first multidisciplinary scientific research effort
specifically designed to study the Web at all scales of size and
complexity, and to develop a new discipline of Web science for future
generations of researchers. The initiative will have four founding
directors: Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium,
senior research scientist at MIT and professor at the University of
Southampton; Wendy Hall, professor of computer science and head of the
School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of
Southampton; Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence at
the University of Southampton and director of the Advanced Knowledge
Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration; and Daniel J.
Weitzner, Technology and Society Domain leader of the World Wide Web
Consortium and principal research scientist at MIT.
See also: the WSRI web site
Toward Integration: Advanced Message Queuing Protocol
Steve Vinoski, IEEE Internet Computing
Various middleware standards exist for synchronous messaging, including
Corba's Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP), Java Remote Method
Invocation (RMI), and SOAP. These protocol's purveyors and providers
typically go the extra mile to ensure that their implementations
interoperate cleanly with other implementations. They do this by
exchanging implementations and performing their own in-house testing,
or by attending special interoperability workshops at which everyone
brings their code and tests interoperability with all other attendees'
implementations. The same doesn't seem to hold true in the world of
asynchronous messaging, however, in which several proprietary products
exist and use their own closed protocols. Examples of such systems
include IBM Websphere MQ (formerly known as MQ Series) and Microsoft
Message Queuing (MSMQ). One standard that these and others could follow
is the Java Message Service (JMS) specification, which is arguably the
best-known standard in the asynchronous messaging world. However, it's
merely an interface, or API, standard: because JMS doesn't specify a
standard protocol, JMS implementations provide their own, which are
also effectively proprietary. In June 2006, JPMorgan Chase (JPMC),
Cisco Systems, Envoy Technologies, iMatix Corporation, IONA Technologies,
Red Hat, TWIST Process Innovations, and 29West together announced the
formation of the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) working group.
The group's goal is to create an open standard for an interoperable
enterprise-scale asynchronous messaging protocol. AMQP and XMPP have
little in common in terms of the applications they serve. I believe the
confusion around these protocols stems simply from the fact that
they're both forms of messaging protocols. However, the two differ
vastly in the type of messaging each performs. XMPP, as its name implies,
is about presence. People use it primarily for instant messaging. AMQP,
on the other hand, is about enterprise messaging. As explained earlier,
enterprise messaging applications often require high levels of
performance, throughput, scalability, and reliability. XMPP/Jabber is
simply not intended for use under the extreme operating conditions that
AMQP is designed to handle.
See also: the IONA AMQP reference page
BACnet Web Services in Action
Chris Gurtler, Automatedbuildings.com
A new ASHRAE Addendum for BACnet Web Services has been released, but
"I suspect many people are a little confused by what it is and what
it's used for. If you are a little curious and you want to see a BACnet
Web Service up and running then this article is for you. You will be
surprised to see just how easy it is to integrate real time data into
just about any application with a Web Service. Let's assume that you
have a BACnet System, and your customer wants to read some real time
data out of your system. He says that he wants to display the
temperature of the Main Foyer onto his intranet site. Now there are
many different ways that each Vendor could do this and you may be
charged a lot of money for the privilege. Some of these solutions may
be good, some of them bad, but wouldn't it be nice if there was a
standard way to do this? The good news is that there is, it's very easy,
and it's all possible with a BACnet Web Service. We start our
demonstration with a .Net application, and then in the next article
describe how it's done by using a Web browser with just HTML and Java
script. The first thing you need to do is get yourself a Web Service,
and if you don't have one, then all you need to do is download the
evaluation version from SCADA Engine."
See also: XML for Facilities Automation Systems
Websense: The Shortest Path to the Future Web
Danny Ayers, IEEE Internet Computing
Web technologies are undergoing a resurgence in creativity, popularly
labeled 'Web 2.0.' The most visible is the rediscovery of client-side
Javascript and its capability, when used alongside (X)HTML and HTTP,
for improving the user experience. Taken together, this toolset has
been rebranded Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX). In many cases,
it offers little more than decoration and minor enhancements to
interaction — definitely improvements, but nothing seismic. However,
one class of applications, known as mashups, do point to something
deeper. A mashup combines data or content from more than one online
source. A typical example might be the integration of a system that
lists public events with a system that generates geographic maps to
produce a hybrid view of the events marked on a map. The recent
explosion of RSS/Atom syndication opens the door to a similar kind of
recombinant data integration. In syndication, the content's essentials
are, in effect, lifted from the traditional Web site or homepage context
and published without styling information but with enhanced metadata
(title, date, links, and so on), which makes it possible for end-user
tools to mash up the content with material from other sources. Every
computer system deals with data locally, so the problem isn't actually
in creating the data but in finding the appropriate language in which
to make it available on the Web. Current practice is generally to use
HTML, but on its own, this is severely limited when it comes to machine
reuse. At least three general strategies exist for exposing that data.
(1) First, developers can add Semantic Web-oriented interfaces to
existing systems —places to receive and provide RDF over HTTP, along
with generic query interfaces using the SPARQL protocol and RDF Query
Language. Given the tools and libraries now available, constructing the
modeling and wiring needed for bridges between the Semantic Web and
local data is relatively straightforward. (2) Embed machine-readable
data in existing HTML content. This can happen in various ways, the
poster child being the microformats initiative. Essentially,
microformats are a set of conventions that enable machine-friendly
access to information in human-oriented markup. (3) Return to Semantic
Web technologies' roots and enrich human-readable content with
machine-readable metadata.
Updated W3C Working Drafts for Web Services Policy 1.5
W3C's Web Services Policy Working Group has released updated Working
Drafts for Web Services Policy 1.5. "Web Services Policy 1.5 - Framework"
defines a framework and a model for expressing policies that refer to
domain-specific capabilities, requirements, and general characteristics
of entities in a Web services-based system. A policy is a collection
of policy alternatives, where a policy alternative is a collection of
policy assertions. A policy assertion represents an individual
requirement, capability, or other property of a behavior. A policy
expression is an XML Infoset representation of a policy, either in a
normal form or in an equivalent compact form. Some policy assertions
specify traditional requirements and capabilities that will ultimately
manifest on the wire (e.g., authentication scheme, transport protocol
selection). Other policy assertions have no wire manifestation yet are
critical to proper service selection and usage (e.g., privacy policy,
QoS characteristics). Web Services Policy 1.5 - Framework provides a
single policy language to allow both kinds of assertions to be expressed
and evaluated in a consistent manner. "Web Services Policy 1.5 -
Attachment" defines two general-purpose mechanisms for associating
policies, as defined in Web Services Policy 1.5 - Framework, with the
subjects to which they apply. This specification also defines how these
general-purpose mechanisms may be used to associate policies with WSDL
and UDDI descriptions.
See also: W3C Web Services Activity
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