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XML and Web Services In The News - 30 November 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by IBM Corporation
HEADLINES:
Software AG: The XML - Oops - SOA Company
John Blau, InfoWorld
Software AG has built a global customer base over 35 years by being an
early mover in a couple of major technology trends. The company
introduced one of the first databases, Adabas, in the 1970s, a
platform-independent computer language, Natural, in the 1980s and an
XML (Extensible Markup Language) server, Tamino, in the 1990s. In this
interview, Peter Kuerpick talks about Software AG's move into products
and services for building an SOA infrastructure. Kuerpick is a member
of the Software AG executive board responsible for research and
development. Excerpts: "What we're doing now with SOA is a natural
extension of what we've done for the last several years. SOA is a
concept of loosely coupling systems and generating new applications
based on highly standardized technologies, such as Web services and
business process management. We've decided to bring a technology stack
to the table that covers all the basic components of SOA. This includes
opening up and connecting any kind of system. We have a toolset to
connect to those systems. And once you've connected to three or four
systems, you'll want to orchestrate a new process that takes data from
system "a" to system "b" and beyond. This is where our enterprise
service bus comes into play... We tell customers they need one central
place, an SOA registry/repository. Here they register all their metadata,
or SOA "artifacts," which describe interfaces, business processes, Web
services and more. The repository is a library of sorts where users
store all the ways they connect systems, providing a map of their IT
landscape. It allows them to govern and manage their SOA infrastructure.
We say that an SOA registry/ repository is a must. It allows businesses
to govern the life-cyle of SOA components, such as services, processes
and policies..."
Enhance UDDI to Manage Web Services
Bijoy Majumdar, Ambar Verma, Ujval Mysore, IBM developerWorks
SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is a relatively new paradigm that
has evolved through many iterations over the years. SOA revolves around
the concept of Web services, which are transforming the way IT
departments function today. Web services refers to a modular, self-
contained piece of code with a well-defined functionality that you can
access across the network. SOA's key components are a service provider,
a service consumer and a service registry. UDDI (Universal Description,
Discovery and Integration) is an XML-based standard that enables users
to create registries where businesses can register their contact
information, the services they offer and technical information about
them. Service requestors can search the registry, find a service they
need, and interact with that service. Web services are primarily used
over the Internet, and a UDDI registry factors out the Web service's
location constraint. At once, a UDDI registry can offer a collection of
services performing a particular task, letting users pick and choose
the one that best suits their particular situation. UDDI has become the
de-facto standard for registering services. Its advantages are twofold:
first, organizations have a trivial registry for all its services
regardless of geographic location, business units and departments; and
second, they can consolidate system assets, saving on business cost and
time. The article illustrates how to use UDDI as an XML-based registry
as well as a security and configuration management solution. The authors
look into the UDDI intricacies, providing easy and simple mapping with
the WSDL (Web Services Description Language) to build the UDDI registry
effortlessly.
See also: OASIS UDDI Spec TC
Spoon: Compile-time Annotation Processing for Middleware
Renaud Pawlak, IEEE Distributed Systems Online
Spoon is a Java-based program analysis and transformation tool for
compile-time annotation processing. It combines compile-time reflection
with a pure Java template framework for well-typed and intuitive fine-
grained metaprogramming, which is applied to the middleware context.
Like deployment descriptors, well-defined annotations can raise a given
program's abstraction level because the end user will only have to talk
about abstract and declaratively expressed intentions. Although
annotations are new in Java, you can find many examples of using
annotations as deployment information. In this article, I show two of
the most recent and well-known annotation-based APIs: service component
architecture and Enterprise JavaBeans. SCA is a set of specifications
describing a model for building applications and systems using a
service-oriented architecture. SCA encourages an SOA organization of
business application code based on components that implement business
logic and that offer their capabilities and consume functions offered
by other components through service-oriented interfaces, or service
references. SCA is built on open standards, such as the Web Services
Description Language for describing and exchanging service-oriented
interfaces in a language-independent manner... The EJB 3 specifications
aim to simplify the EJB standard, which many Java programmers consider
hard to use. In particular, they encourage using annotations to replace
complex, verbose XML deployment descriptors. You can define most EJBs
as plain old Java objects (POJOs) with inline deployment information
and reduce the need for implementing or using middleware-specific
services. In addition to the core EJB component model, EJB 3
specifications provide an annotation-based persistence specification,
which includes object/relational (O/R) mapping facilities for POJO
Entity beans. Spoon doesn't support automatic processor or template
composition as advanced program-transformations tools do, but leaves
this task to the programmers. Nevertheless, it provides several
processing strategies and a comprehensive API for ordering the
processors and defining new strategies.
See also: on SCA
Web Services Hints and Tips: JAX-RPC vs. JAX-WS
Russell Butek and Nicholas Gallardo, IBM developerWorks
While some aspects of JAX-WS 2.0 are merely evolutionary to JAX-RPC
1.1, other parts are revolutionary. For example, JAX-WS does not
provide mapping between XML schema and Java, a major feature of
JAX-RPC 1.1. Instead, JAX-WS uses another JCP-defined technology,
JAXB (the Java Architecture for XML Binding) 2.0, to do its data
mapping for it. JAX-WS simply represents the invocation model for
Web services. It no longer concerns itself with the Java Beans that
represent application data; it only focuses on delivering them to the
target Web service. Here, we'll compare JAX-RPC 1.1 and the JAXB 2.0
mappings. This article (Part 2 in a series) compares the data mappings
of these two Web services specifications. JAXB generates a file that
JAX-RPC does not: ObjectFactory. Each directory containing Java Beans
will have one ObjectFactory. For each type defined in the schema's
corresponding namespace, the ObjectFactory class will have a create
method for that type. With a judicious sprinkling of these new JAXB-
defined annotations, Java can map in a well-directed manner to XML,
essentially in the reverse of the XML-to-Java mappings that we have
presented. But what about unannotated Java? Mapping Java names to XML
names in JAX-RPC and JAXB are essentially the same. That is, Java
primitive types map to the same XML schema whether the mapping follows
JAX-RPC or JAXB. JAX-RPC defines a small set of standard Java classes
that map to XML. For all but one of those, JAXB maps precisely the
same, but JAXB adds a few more to its list of mapped classes.
Corel Announces "Have it Your Way" Format Strategy
Andy Updegrove, ConsortiumInfo.org Blog
In an excellent example of "better late than never," Corel Corporation
announced this morning that it's next release of its flagship Corel
WordPerfect Office suite will provide open, view and edit support for
ODF — and for Office OpenXML (OOXML), the format submitted to Ecma
for adoption, as well. The announcement states that the new
functionality will be just a "first step towards a comprehensive set of
functionality for both formats," but does not specify what actions might
follow, or when. Corel was one of the original ODF committee members at
OASIS, the developer of ODF, and attended a strategy meeting of ODF
proponents at an IBM facility in Armonk, NY ion November 4 of 2005, but
then declined to commit to support ODF. Instead, it adopted a "wait
and see" attitude. In its announcement this morning, Corel is
positioning itself as a neutral in the current format competition
between Microsoft, on the one hand, and a band of disparate allies on
the other that support ODF: Major vendors IBM and Sun, each with an
ODF-compliant offering, various proprietary and open source office
suite vendors that support ODF, Google (with its Writely-based on-line
services), and a variety of other supporters most easily identified by
viewing the membership list of the ODF Alliance.
Web 2.0: Ingredients For A Site Makeover
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
CollabNet, whose products enable software developers to collaborate,
has set up an online community for CollabNet and Subversion users. The
openCollabNet online community is based on "Web 2.0 principles" and is
built around the Subversion version control system and CollabNet's
product offerings. CollabNet defines Web 2.0 principles as the
interactivity of tools, such as using Wikis, to enable joint
collaboration on a document or project. With the online community, users
can share innovations and best practices. They receive access to
community resources, product extensions, discussion forums, technical
content and support. CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.5.1 also provides
access to openCollabNet. Customers can participate in development of
extensions to CollabNet and try new functionality. Free versions of
CollabNet Enterprise Edition and CollabNet Subversion are available as
part of the new program. The free download of CollabNet Enterprise
includes a license for as many as 15 users. CollabNet provides a web-
based software development environment specifically designed for
geographically distributed development teams. It integrates applications
such as Software Configuration Management and Issue Tracking with
collaboration, project management, and Application Lifecycle Management
tools in an on-demand environment. Subversion is rapidly becoming the
new version control standard for geographically distributed development
teams. CollabNet Subversion also includes commonly used client software
such as TortoiseSVN and Subclipse, the Eclipse plugin for Subversion.
See also: the announcement
Family Tree of Schema Languages (Version 6)
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Technical
Rick Jelliffe reports on the availability of an updated graphic showing
a "Family Tree of Schema Languages for Markup Languages", 1986-2006.
The graphic lists specifications for renaming, grammar, datatypes, and
'patterns and path constraints'. The graphic now includes XSD 1.1, ISO
DSDL part 9, TEI Feature Sets, CSD, and WSDL which has a kind of
content model capability.
See also: the announcement
XSLT as Pretty Printer
Hew Wolff, XML.com
Recently I was wading through some hard-to-read XML files. The company
I work for was helping a client to build an Ajax-style Web interface
that used XML to talk to the backend and client-side XSLT to produce
the HTML. I found myself reformatting the XML by hand to make things
easier and finally wondering as I hit the spacebar yet again: couldn't
an XSLT style sheet do this formatting for me? I had done something
similar before, so I decided to try writing that style sheet, using a
test-driven approach. Some hours later I had a handy utility, and a new
appreciation for some of the wrinkles of XML. [Ed. note: XML pretty
printing has been implemented many times; the arcticle cited uses
a test-driven development approach inspired by Extreme Programming
starting with "The Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work": an
empty style sheet with a hopeful comment... specifies that the output
is generic XML, and include the usual XSLT namespace so that the XSLT
processor knows that xsl:... elements are XSLT instructions and not
just data...]
See also: Pretty Printing XML
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