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XML and Web Services In The News - 07 December 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
Open XML Becomes a Standard
Peter Sayer, InfoWorld
Microsoft Corp. has won approval for its Offfice Open XML document
format from international standards body ECMA International. ECMA's
General Assembly voted by 20-1 in favor of the standard at a meeting
in Zurich on Thursday afternoon, and will now submit the format to the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for its approval.
The vote against came from a representative of IBM Corp. A standardized
document format will make it easier for competing software companies
to develop products that can interoperate with one another and to edit
the same documents. Products meeting the standard could find favor with
governments, or other organizations concerned about interoperability.
Interoperability is vital for the preservation of archive information,
according to Adam Farquhar, head of e-architecture at the British
Library and a member of the committee that worked on the standard at
ECMA. The British Library archives electronic documents, but must deal
with whatever format they arrive in. The development of interoperable
software tools will make that work easier. Accessibility is important
if Microsoft is to win developers over to its document format, as the
company faces competition in the standards industry just as it does in
the software market. A rival document format, OpenDocument Format (ODF),
has already won approval from ISO, and was published as an ISO standard
last month. ODF is used by office productivity suites such as
OpenOffice.org or Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice, and has gained
the support of other companies, including IBM. Government officials in
France and the U.S. commonwealth of Massachusetts have recommended
adoption of ODF as a government standard. ECMA has asked that the
standard be fast-tracked, a process to which national standards bodies
now have about 30 days to object. If no one objects, then ISO
Subcommittee 34 will spend five or six months examining comments on
the standard received from the national standards bodies, and only
then will the ISO's Joint Technical Committee 1 vote on the standard.
See also: the white paper
XQuery, XSLT, and OmniMark: Mixed Content Processing
Alexander Boldakov, Maxim Grinev, Kirill Lisovsky, XML.com
Document-oriented XML usually has highly irregular structure in which
elements might be mixed in unknown way. Processing such XML requires
advanced data-driven facilities: push-style processing enriched with
transformation rules and side-effect-free updates. In this article we
emphasize such facilities in three XML-native languages: XQuery, XSLT,
and OmniMark; and analyze applicability of these languages and their
combinations to document-oriented XML processing. As data in many
practical applications often comes as a result of a database query, we
also examine various approaches to combine XQuery with XSLT or OmniMark
for document-oriented XML processing over a database system. Processing
document-oriented XML in modern content management applications is a
challenging task, as it often requires both content transformation and
database querying. Domain-specific XML transformation languages (e.g.,
XSLT and OmniMark) are very good at document-oriented XML processing
but require a query language (e.g., XQuery) to access a database. In
XQuery document-oriented XML processing can be implemented via
transform mechanism, but this mechanism is suitable only for simple
transformation tasks performed on the database side. To build elegant
and efficient document-oriented XML processing applications, we have
to combine transformation and query languages. We here describe two
possible approaches, which we call tightly coupled and loosely coupled,
to combine the languages and discussed the pros and cons of these
approaches. XQuery-featuring systems has an advantage over SQL-based
ones for loosely coupled solutions. Chunks, which include all the data
required to process themselves, have quite a complex (hierarchical)
structure. SQL does not provide adequate construction facilities to
build such structures, as it is designed to deal with simpler (flat)
structures. Thanks to XML node constructors, such structures can be
easily built in XQuery.
See also: W3C XQuery
Data Export, Delivered: Porting Your Email Address Lists
Jon Udell, InfoWorld
From time to time I get recruited to help someone export mail and
contacts from one e-mail program and import the data into another.
The fact that a civilian must recruit a geek to accomplish this
seemingly mundane task speaks volumes about our industry's sad history
of data lock-in. Even for a geek, the solution can easily become a
slide down a slippery slope. There's no shortage of converters floating
around on the Net, but it's surprisingly hard to find one that will
reliably and completely transform, say, WAB (Windows Address Book) to
LDIF (LDAP Data Interchange Format) or CSV (comma-separated values).
Back in 2002, I discovered that Mozilla's mail program, now known as
Thunderbird, could import mail and contacts from an Outlook PST file
and then export the data as Mbox for mail and LDIF or CSV for contacts.
My referral log tells me that, to this day, people continue to seek
out and use that technique. It came in handy again this week when a
friend wanted to switch from Outlook Express to Gmail. Exporting her
contacts to a CSV file, and then importing them into Gmail, turned out
to be a snap. But when I declared victory, she sent me scrambling down
the slippery slope with this innocent-sounding question: 'What about
my distribution lists?' [...] I used Gmail's interface to delete the
list I'd just made, then invoked the curl command to recreate it. When
that worked, I wrote a simple script to interpolate names and addresses
from the exported LDIF files into a series of curl commands, and invoke
them one at a time. And that was that. It was only a partial solution,
of course. A fully automated version would tie into libgmail's
authentication scheme, obviating the need to capture and replay an
HTTP header. But the fact that it's possible to discover and exploit
implicit APIs in this way is a testament to the power and flexibility
of the Web's architectural style. The Web's open architectural style
and implicit APIs can help overcome data lock-in.
Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0
Jutta Treviranus, Jan Richards, Matt May, W3C Technical Report
W3C's Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has
published a revised Working Draft for the "Authoring Tool Accessibility
Guidelines 2.0" specification, updating the previous version of
2005-11-23. The Working Group requests comments prior to a second
Last Call release. The ATAG document includes recommendations for
assisting authoring tool developers to make their tools (and the Web
content that the tools generate) more accessible to all people,
especially people with disabilities, who may potentially be either
authors or end users. These guidelines have been written to address
the requirements of many different audiences, including, but not
limited to: policy makers, technical administrators, and those who
develop or manage content. An attempt has been made to make this
document as readable and usable as possible for that diverse audience,
while still retaining the accuracy and clarity needed in a technical
specification. The specification includes a definition of conformance
levels: authoring tools may claim conformance to ATAG 2.0 at one of
three conformance levels. The level achieved depends on the priority
of those checkpoints for which the authoring tool has satisfied the
success criteria. ATAG 2.0 is part of a series of accessibility
guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI); the
relationship between these documents is explained in "Essential
Components of Web Accessibility".
See also: the W3C news item
Java EE 5 Faces the SOA Test, Part 1
Colleen Frye, SearchWebServices.com
As the computing world strives to become increasingly service-oriented,
what role will the latest version of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition
(Java EE) play? A half-year after the approval of the Java EE 5
specification by the Java Community Process (JCP) and its debut this
spring at JavaOne, debate is ongoing about the programming platform's
relevance to SOA and how well suited it is to the style of development
that increasingly favors lighter-weight tools and more rapid results.
A key goal of Java EE 5 was to simplify the programming model,
especially for Web services. Although the previous version, J2EE 1.4,
supported SOAP- and WSDL-based Web services, many found the model too
complex. Nick Kassem, technology director for Web services at Sun
Microsystems Inc. said the improvements to Java EE 5 better enable the
loose coupling of services, while providing the robust technology that
will be required to scale up Web services and build out an SOA. Java
EE 5 includes several key specifications intended to improve and
simplify Web services support. These are: Java API for XML-Based Web
Services (JAX-WS) 2.0, Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) 2.0,
Web Services Metadata for the Java Platform 2.0 and SOAP with
Attachments API for Java (SAAJ) 1.3. In particular, JAX-WS 2.0 supports
annotations, simplifying the programming model. It is integrated with
JAXB 2.0, so all data binding has been delegated to JAXB 2.0. JAX-WS
2.0 has the ability to support additional protocols, transports and
encodings. It also supports SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, and XML/HTTP protocols
as well as REST-style applications. In addition, advanced applications
can use the low-level, messaging-based JAX-WS 2.0 API to process
messages directly, without having to duplicate any of the protocol-
and transport-level support built into the runtime, according to Sun.
OMB to Grade Agencies On Health IT Interoperability Plans
Mary Mosquera, Government Computing News
U.S. Agencies must finalize plans by January 1, 2007 on how they will
incorporate health IT standards and quality metrics in their contracts,
according to Karen Evans, the Office of Management and Budget's
administrator for e-government and IT. The date reflects the timeline
in an August 2006 White House executive order for agencies to include
health IT interoperability standards, and quality and price
transparency when they acquire and update systems for health data
exchange. Agencies are to push those requirements out to contractors
as part of doing business with the government. The Health and Human
Services Department (HSS) will ask the National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST) to certify adopted health IT interoperability
standards under the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS).
The executive order chiefly applies to HHS, OPM and the Defense and
Veterans Affairs departments. It will also apply to other agencies that
provide or process some health data, such as the Energy Department,
which has health information systems to track exposure of workers to
nuclear materials.
See also: XML in Clinical Research and Healthcare Industries
IBM, AccuWeather Put Weather in Your Hands
Clint Boulton, InternetNews.com
What's the forecast for wikis and mashups in the enterprise world?
It's too soon to tell, but IBM and AccuWeather want to make sure it's
clear and sunny. AccuWeather is evaluating IBM's QEDWiki enterprise
mashup development tool, examining how it might use it to funnel
weather forecasts to customers as a subscription-based service. One
of the key building blocks of the emerging Web 2.0 world, mashups are
composite applications comprised of two or more pieces of software
working together to provide greater efficiencies for Web users. QEDWiki
is a software technology that enables mashups, providing business
professionals widgets through which they can combine applications and
connect to content, said Dan Gisolfi, an executive IT architect for
emerging Internet technologies at IBM. Together, IBM and AccuWeather
will explore how they might build mashups to offer customers on a
subscription basis, as well as establish pilot programs for their
commercial clients to evaluate the AccuWeather QEDWiki widgets, or
user interfaces. The AccuWeather weather information will be available
as "individual palettes" of data and display widgets, which can then be
mashed up by QEDWiki users. Weather-oriented information in the mashups
could include temperature and precipitation; real-time local storm
reports and severe weather watches; and tropical and marine forecasts,
such as sea-surface temperature, wind speed and direction, and ocean
wave heights.
XML Conference 2006: Third Day
Keith Fahlgren, O'Reilly News
Several attendees at the XML 2006 Conference have been blogging on this
year's events and papers. In this blog installment, Keith Fahlgren
summarizes: (1) The XML Scholarship winning paper by Paolo Marinelli
and Stefano Zacchiroli, "Co-constraint Validation in a Streaming
Context." (2) "Managing Content with the Atom Publishing Protocol,"
by Andrew Savikas. (3) "Meta-stylesheets," by Michael Kay. (4) Panel
on the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), led by Alan
Houser.
See also: the Elliotte Rusty Harold blog
MySQL, Open-Xchange Announce Partnership
Nancy Gohring, InfoWorld
Open-source players MySQL and Open-Xchange are teaming up so Open-
Xchange can embed MySQL's database into its Linux-based collaboration
server. The two companies announced a partnership and support agreement
Thursday to optimize the interaction between MySQL databases and
Open-Xchange groupware functions. Open-Xchange customers won't have
to pay extra for product support for MySQL, they said. The partnership
will result in more choice for customers in the way that they use the
Open-Xchange server and can help users cut costs, according to
Open-Xchange. MySQL was interested in supporting the integration
because an increasing number of companies are choosing open-source
collaboration products, like Open-Xchange, instead of proprietary
products, the database vendor said. Open-Xchange competes with other
open-source collaboration products from Scalix and Zimbra as well as
established proprietary software including Microsoft's Exchange and
IBM's Notes/Domino. The move is typical of a growing wave of significant
partnerships being struck between commercial open-source players
designed to simplify the integration of their respective products.
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