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XML and Web Services In The News - 6 November 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP AG
HEADLINES:
Good Call: Delaware uses VoiceXML to Expand Online
Rob Thormeyer, Government Computer News
Internet access has not been widely available in Delaware's rural
pockets, which stretch across the state, or to vacation homes along the
coast. As a result, the state's efforts to offer services over the
Internet were not reaching a considerable portion of the population
living outside the one metropolitan area. Solution: Through the use of
VoiceXML, Access Delaware has brought the state's online services into
the homes of thousands. Citizens call an 800-number and receive
information on where to find free Internet access and where to vote,
as well as drought conditions and, soon, data on health emergencies.
VoiceXML is an Extensible Markup Language that communicates through a
telephone or voice browser rather than a graphical one. The language
accepts spoken input so it is accessible for those with visual
challenges, although users can punch responses into the phone keypad
as well. VoiceXML is open standard, making it easy for IT staff with
some Web experience to update the system. Delaware runs VoiceXML on a
Microsoft Windows platform, but officials said it can run on any
operating system. DTI collaborated with other state agencies to
determine what information to make available over the phone. For
instance, Access Delaware first contained information about where
citizens without a computer could get online for free. More recently,
the state added a feature that lets citizens track their tax returns
and a connection to the Delaware Helpline, which provides live
assistance.
See also: the W3C Voice Browser Activity
Q&A with Bill Hilf: Microsoft Open to Open-Source Pacts
Jeremy Kirk, InfoWorld
Last week's pact between Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. has led to
widespread speculation over the long-term impact on the adoption of
open-source software. Under the deal, the companies will work on ways
to enable Novell's Linux distribution, Suse, and Microsoft's Windows
operating system to work better together. They also reached a patent
truce in which users of the other's software can't be sued for
infringement, and Microsoft agreed not to sue noncommercial open-
source developers. Microsoft's Bill Hilf, general manager for platform
strategy, spoke further about the deal with IDG News Service,
addressing how Microsoft views its intellectual property relative to
Linux. Hilf: "This is an intellectual-property deal. There will be an
overlap at some point between our intellectual property and open
source that we have to resolve. We knew that. It was going to happen.
It was just a question of when. We said let's put in place something
that allows us to a) establish a process for how we can work with an
open-source company on our intellectual property, b) do it in such as
way that it can still work within the GNU GPL (general public license)
and c) how do we do this in a way where we can clearly draw the line
between the community developer, the noncommercial open-source
community guy writing code and the commercial developer who is using
open-source code. Doing one of those is easy, doing two of them is
actually hard but possible. Doing all three is very, very hard
because one can contradict the other. What we are trying to do is
draw the line between people who make money from this and people who
don't. We needed to have the peace of mind both for the customers who
are choosing to put this stuff into their environment as well as
developers."
See also: the announcement
Alliance Statement On Microsoft/Novell Collaboration Regarding Document Format Compatibility
Staff, ODF Alliance
The OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance), a broad cross-section
of organizations, academia and industry dedicated to improving access
to electronic government documents, issued the following statement
regarding Microsoft and Novell's announcement regarding collaboration
on document format compatibility: "We see yesterday's announcement as
further acknowledgement from Microsoft that ODF is something customers
are demanding," said Marino Marcich, Managing Director of the ODF
Alliance. "By making it easier for some Open Office users to access
files stored in Microsoft's Office Open XML format, it makes it easier
for customers to adopt ODF without worrying about the difficulty of
tapping into files stored in a proprietary format that others may send
them, or that they may have stored in their own systems.""Open Office
and other ODF-supporting implementations already support a variety of
legacy or proprietary formats, and Office Open XML will be a welcome
addition. In terms of Microsoft's translator project that would save
Word files in the ODF format, the Alliance still thinks that the
translator project does not yet provide true interoperability, and we
encourage Microsoft to provide native support in Office that will allow
users to save to ODF as easily as any other format."
See also: ODF references
BEA Updates SOA Integration Offerings
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
BEA Systems is enhancing its enterprise integration strategy and
solution portfolio to help customers realize the business benefits of
service-oriented architecture. The new pieces of the San Jose, Calif.,
company's SOA puzzle include a new version of the BEA WebLogic
Integration (WLI) product and a new version of BEA AquaLogic Service
Bus (ALSB). BEA WLI 9.2 features several new functional and performance
enhancements including an Eclipse-based development environment for
ease of design and developer productivity; controls that are compliant
with the Apache Beehive project; Java annotations based on JSR-175 for
standards-based code generation; improved design-time experience,
performance and usability for processes that span human and system
resources; and a new Worklist module with a drag-and-drop design
environment, forms-based test console, and out-of-the-box portlets
for user interaction to enable powerful exception management in fine-
grained processes, [Rosemary ] Stark said. Kelly Emo, director of BEA
Integration product marketing, said BEA ALSB 2.6 features several new
enhancements to expand connectivity to a wide array of services,
enhance standards support for messaging and provisioning, and provide
additional configuration and deployment flexibility, including the
ability to invoke a database lookup directly from ALSB to support
message enrichment and validation scenarios; new features for
customizing configuration scenarios and automating deployment including
design-time APIs for configuration actions, support for rules-based
deployments and support for a much more extensive list of environment
variables; support for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP ) 1.2; and
support for Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI)
Version 3 automated import of business services to ensure that changes
made in a business service registry, such as BEA AquaLogic Service
Registry, are immediately reflected in the Service Bus.
See also: InfoWorld
Exploit XML Indexes for XML Query Performance in DB2 9
Matthias Nicola, IBM developerWorks
This article presents a set of guidelines for writing XML queries and
creating XML indexes in a consistent manner so that indexes speed up
your queries as expected. Also learn what to look for in XML query
execution plans to detect performance issues, and find out how to fix
them. A downloadable "cheat sheet" summarizes the most important
guidelines. DB2 9 provides pureXML storage together with XML indexes,
XQuery and SQL/XML as query languages, XML schema support, and XML
extensions to utilities such as Import/Export and Runstats. Just as for
relational queries, indexes are crucial for high performance of your
XQuery and SQL/XML statements. DB2 allows you to define path-specific
XML indexes on XML columns. That means you can use them to index
selected elements and attributes that are frequently used in predicates
and joins. When your application submits a relational or XML query to
DB2, the query compiler compares the query predicates with existing
index definitions and determines if any available indexes can be used
to execute the query. This process is known as "index matching" and
produces a (possibly empty) set of eligible indexes for the given query.
This set is input to the cost-based optimizer that decides whether to
use any of the eligible indexes or not. In this article, the focus is
on index matching rather than the optimizer's index selection.
See also: XML and Databases
SOA: Under Construction
Galen Gruman, InfoWorld
As enterprises build SOAs, the going is pretty slow, thanks mainly to
a vastly increasing number of dependencies. Here's what you can learn
from what's happening on the ground Ask anyone in charge of constructing
an SOA (service-oriented architecture), and they'll tell you that the
hardest part isn't the technology; it's redrawing the business
processes that provide the basis for the architecture — and the often
contentious reshuffling of roles and responsibilities that ensues. Many
SOA practitioners say that, so it must be true. But the technology part
isn't necessarily easy, either. After all the planning and strategizing
is complete, services and their messaging infrastructure must be
provisioned and managed, alongside whatever platforms, applications,
and systems are already in place. The ultimate objective of SOA is a
supremely agile infrastructure, where IT develops composite applications
atop of a layer of abstraction that spans multiple platforms and domains
across the enterprise. But nobody can "boil the ocean" and achieve that
goal all at once. Practical SOA initiatives begin with a related set of
business processes that would clearly benefit from greater flexibility
— where market conditions are in constant flux, for example, or new
services must be deployed on the fly for competitive reasons. At some
point that top-down approach meets the bottom-up reality of existing
software assets and infrastructure.
See also: the editor
Berkeley's Mesh Network: Dust in the RFID Wind
Renee Boucher Ferguson, eWEEK
UC/Berkeley researchers have created tiny wireless "motes" (aka network
sensors) that use radio signals to communicate where they are located
in physical space. The end goal: an RFID network that could
revolutionize the industry with its ability to locate tagged items
without the aid of readers. In January 2003 Smart Dust was
commercialized when Pister co-founded Dust Networks. Now Pister is
back at Berkeley full time, working with graduate student Steven
Lanzisera on this next phase of sensor network innovation, dubbed RF
Time of Flight. It could have a huge impact on the ubiquitous use of
RFID. To understand RF Time of Flight, one has to go back to the basics
of Smart Dust. Smart Dust refers to motes laid out in a mesh network
that search and find one another, form a network, then communicate
information back and forth. To set up a mesh network in a hospital or
warehouse, for example, three access points are placed at random points
and connected wirelessly to an interrogator. Then a dozen (or 100,000)
motes come into the network, set up a multi-hub mesh, and start to
communicate and report their nearest range. Measuring the distance from
one mote to the next provides a reading of where tagged items are. RF
Time of Flight adds radio communication and ranging capability. Intended
to be about the size of a grain of sand or a piece of dust — the motes
from Dust Networks are currently about the size of a quarter — the
motes contain sensors, computing circuits, bi-directional wireless
technology, and an antenna and very low-battery power supply that are
external to the chip. The motes can detect light, temperature or
vibrations. Pister sees asset tracking as the biggest application area
for RF Time of Flight, from tracking patients and doctors in a hospital
to tracking assets in a theater of war (particularly since early Smart
Dust funding came from the Department of Defense). But he also sees
many other potential areas of use.
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