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XML and Web Services In The News - 15 December 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP AG
HEADLINES:
RDF Versus XQuery: Different Tools for Different Problems
Bob DuCharme, Blog
RDF and related technologies fall short in areas where XML and XQuery
shine, but XML and XQuery fall short in areas where RDF shines. And
they both fall short in areas where relational databases shine, and...
etc. RDF is a data model. Certain problem domains map very well to that
data model, especially large collections of assignments of values to
objects that don't normalize into relational tables or even a single
XML schema well. An add-on like OWL makes it easier to define
relationships between seemingly unrelated classes of information,
making it easier to use the aggregate sources together. RDF can add a
lot to a publishing system, but tracking the relationship between
in-line elements and their containing block elements (that is, mixed
content) is not something it can help much. For example, it can be
used to store metadata about document components and associations as
document files moves through a workflow... Searching within documents
is certainly where XQuery shines, but unless you're using an XQuery
engine for pure substring search (for example, "show me which documents
have the string 'fireplace' in them"), the insurance policy and rental
agreement examples would only work well with XQuery if all of the
documents conformed to the same schema. The RDF/OWL strength that
makes it popular for semantic web work is its ability to query
collections of data in the same domain that aren't necessarily all of
identical structure
See also: the XML 2006 presentation
Mars Project: Developing an XML-based Representation of PDF Documents
Staff, Adobe Labs Technical Paper
Adobe has provided updated information about the Mars (code name)
project, defining an XML-friendly implementation of PDF syntax. "PDF
today faces increased demand to interoperate with XML based formats
and technologies. PDF has historically been difficult for developers
to work with because of its complex internal structure.Mars addresses
these issues. We hope to enable a larger group of developers to more
easily build PDF-based applications. Mars does this by providing a
representation of PDF that can be more easily understood and
manipulated by XML-savvy developers and tools. Documents and forms can
be created and manipulated in Mars format which can be directly opened
by Acrobat or Reader or converted to PDFC (PDF Cos-based) format.
COS is the name of the object syntax used by PDF. The goals of Mars
are to: (1) Provide an XML representation of PDF combined with a
ZIP-based package that is a forward-looking, competitive representation
of PDF to address customer and competitive demands. (2) Support
developers who what to leverage their XML tools and knowledge to create,
manipulate, and extract information from PDF. (3) Provide an XML
document solution for organizations that have chosen to unify their
infrastructure using XML as the base representation. (4) Define and
implement a representation of PDF information based on reusable XML
components or subassemblies. These subassemblies represent self-
contained pieces of document information that might be used in a
variety of contexts including contexts not involving PDF documents.
Mars should represent page content using a standard XML format: this
format is SVG, a W3C Recommendation. It should be possible to
round-trip PDF extension data. This means that dictionaries in a PDFC
file that are not defined in the PDF spec should be able to be converted
to the Mars XML format, and that XML should be able to reproduce the
extension dictionaries when the Mars containing them is converted back
to a PDFC file. Mars should lower the bar for creation of PDF documents.
A variety of XML tools can be applied to help in the task, and dealing
with COS syntax and COS object relationships is not required." [From
the "Preliminary Mars File Format Specification."]
See also: the Mars web site
Special Report: Java EE 5 Faces the SOA test, Part 2
Colleen Frye, SearchWebServices.com
During this transitional period from what enterprise Java was to what
building an enterprise-grade SOA, the Java ecosystem players are
exploring the possibilities and many are putting their eggs in more
than one basket. Bruce Snyder, co-founder and developer for the
Geronimo project and a senior architect at LogicBlaze Inc., an open
source SOA provider, said "enterprise-grade" means different things
to different organizations, but that building an SOA should not
require a "forklift upgrade." Snyder said enterprise-grade SOA should
have flexibility on the back end as well as on the developer side, and
by that he means making it easier to do things. "There's a portion of
Java EE trying to standardize on that," he said, such as the move
toward annotations with the JAX-WS spec. "It's good in terms of
standardization, but in terms of flexibility and simplifying things,
I'm not sure Java EE 5 does that. I still see people going outside of
Java EE to look for solutions." Michael Bechauf, vice president of
industry standards at SAP AG, said enterprise-grade SOA "must be
secure, reliable and interoperable. However, beyond those technical
characteristics, what's key is that a company needs to employ a
consistent set of design rules across all its services. The services
also need to be designed in a way that they can cover use cases across
multiple industries. They need to use a consistent set of data types
that interoperate with common industry vocabularies such as RosettaNet.
The services need to have the right granularity to allow for both
coarse-grained, message type, business-to-business communication, as
well as fine-grained access into a business system so that customers
can exploit those services for business flexibility and best practices
in their lines of business. For fine-grained services, each call needs
to transition the business system from one consistent state into
another. Sometimes, flexibility needs to be traded-off against system
consistency." Organizations have to be asking themselves, just how
much work is involved in taking existing enterprise apps and
componentizing/service-enabling them? And does Java EE 5 make it
easier?
Managing Code Modification and Duplication: Configuration-Driven Development
Steve McDuff, IBM developerWorks
You can compare code duplication to an accident waiting to happen,
just waiting for someone to make a modification and forget to carry
it over to the duplicated sources. The resulting setback can be
significant or minor, but no matter the magnitude, duplication remains
a source of trouble. The difference between configuration-driven
development and model-driven development is that the former is not
restricted to the model of the code such as classes, fields, and
relationships. Configuration-driven development (CCD) encompasses
anything that can be configured within your application. For example,
if your architecture dictates that particular business rules must be
applied consistently across your application, you can use configuration
files to configure and apply those rules. This article introduces
configuration-driven development and explains how it can resolve code
duplication and modification problems. The author proposes a simple
and efficient way to achieve a functional and successful configuration-
driven development process. In configuration-driven development,
developers make all modifications primarily in XML files. All other
files related to the application read their configuration from those
files, either at runtime or by having selected parts generated at
build time. In the case of the Rational Portfolio Manager, we stored
the following components and information in configuration files...
Using the [sample] configuration file, it is possible to generate:
(1) A database layout; (2) A Web services interface; (3) Java model
classes; (4) User documentation; (5) A simple user interface that
uses the labels and embeds documentation for tooltips and help files;
(6) Unit test frameworks for each attribute and rule in the
configuration... While configuration-driven development is not a
radically new idea, getting it to work efficiently in a typically
constrained modern work environment can be challenging.
ModelDriven.org Community for Model Driven Methods and Technologies
Staff, Data Access Technologies Announcement
On December 6, 2006, industry partners announced ModelDriven.org as a
community of government, commercial and university members who use,
develop, and integrate open source and commercial capabilities to enable
agile business solutions based on model driven methods and technologies.
The initiative is a division of Data Access Technologies, Inc.
ModelDriven.org is standards based, leveraging Model Driven Architecture
as defined by the OMG and the Semantic Web as defined by W3C. This
community has both a user membership and a provider membership. The
user community drives the agenda — it is their needs that
ModelDriven.org and the provider community are there to address.
ModelDriven.org serves the open source (and "open model") community by
being an active contributor to open source and sponsoring open source
projects that help build the Model Driven vision. ModelDriven.org
provides open source developers a way to focus efforts on problems that
need to be addressed and a way to build quality architectures and
software that will really make a difference. ModeDriven.org provides
commercial vendors with an outlet for their products and services that
support open source and a venue for funded open source projects that
are strategically important for both the provider and user communities.
The Business Process Definition Meta Model specification has been
through a multi-year process within the Object Management Group (OMG)
to define a common meta model for the various process notations,
methodologies and standards. BPDM also serves as the meta model behind
the popular Business Process Modeling (BPMN) notation. BPDM is a
robust representation of business process modeling concepts. As a
MOF-based metamodel, it is accompanied by an XMI standard format for
model exchange. BPDM is consistent with the MDA approach in providing
a representation that separates implementation choices to other stages
of system design. BPDM process models can be implemented by people
exchanging paper documents, or may be automated or a combination of
both. It provides a base from which more implementation-specific
information make be added, for example, with stereotypes for manual
and automated processes.
Open Access Agreement: Oxford Journals and National Library of Medicine
Staff, Oxford Journals Announcement
Oxford Journals has announced a new agreement with the National Library
of Medicine (NLM) that will allow all content published as open access
under its Oxford Open model to be available from PubMed Central. The
agreement makes it easier for authors publishing with Oxford Journals
to meet the requirements of their funding bodies, including the National
Institutes of Health (NIH), who request all NIH-funded content to be
deposited into PubMed Central within 12 months of online publication.
Previously, authors who chose to participate in the Oxford Open
initiative were entitled to self-archive a post-print of their accepted
manuscript and/or the final published version of their article into an
institutional or central repository. The new agreement means that all
content published under Oxford Open will be immediately deposited into
PubMed Central by Oxford Journals directly. Oxford Journals has
published almost 2000 open access articles in 2006 through its Oxford
Open models, including optional open access for 49 journals, and full
open access with Nucleic Acids Research. Martin Richardson, Managing
Director, Oxford Journals" "We recognise the importance of ensuring
that our authors are able to comply with the policies for those funding
their research, and in particular any requirement there is to make the
material publicly available as soon as possible after publication.
Deposit of open access articles by the Publisher, on behalf of authors,
will also benefit readers who will know that they are accessing the
version of record." In August 2006, launch of UK PubMed Central (UKPMC)
was announced — a repository based on the PubMed Central in the United
States, operated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Like its
American counterpart, UKPMC will provide free access to an online
digital archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and
life sciences. Officials at the Wellcome Trust, strong advocates of
open access, said the contract to run UKPMC was awarded to a
partnership between the British Library, the University of Manchester
and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI).
See also: the Oxford Open Initiative
Ease AJAX Development with the Google Web Toolkit
Jeff Hanson, JavaWorld Magazine
Google Web Toolkit is a Java development framework for AJAX application
development. GWT removes much of the technical details of AJAX-based
RPC communication and provides a library of widget components for
building rich UIs. GWT allows a developer to implement and debug AJAX-
based applications in Java using common Java development tools and then
compile and deploy the applications as client-side HTML and JavaScript,
and server-side Java. GWT fuses client-side and server-side code
together with Java as the common language. This common environment along
with features such as enhanced debugging does come with a few drawbacks.
For example, GWT is completely dependent on the availability of
JavaScript. If JavaScript is not available, the UI will simply not work.
Also, where traditional Web-client development technologies deliberately
seek to underscore security vulnerabilities, GWT's use of Java for both
client and server development can conceal vulnerabilities and lead to
a false sense of runtime security. GWT's abstractions form a black-box
framework that eliminates many common Web application development
challenges, as it steers developers towards an AJAX-styled development
model. However, this black-box environment complicates integration of
other non-AJAX technologies. Therefore, GWT is most applicable to Web
applications designed around a rich GUI, single page model.
See also: the GWT web site
Is Microsoft Thinking of Closing Windows?
Staff, Computer Business Review Online
Gartner Inc has predicted that the recently released Windows Vista
will be the last major release of Microsoft Corp's Windows operating
system. While that might seem like an outlandish statement at first
glance, the research firm went on to explain that it believes Microsoft
will move to a modular, incremental update model for future versions
of Windows. Advertisement Microsoft has increased its use of Windows
Update as a software delivery mechanism in recent years, using it for
the distribution of Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Internet Explorer 7,
and the company admits that it is considering its options. Given the
level of attention on Microsoft's shipment dates, and its tendency to
miss them, you could forgive the company for deciding to move away
from the monolithic delivery model. Compare the potential significance
of a Windows delay on Microsoft's financial performance in a particular
quarter to Red Hat Inc's attitude to a delay for its core operating
system. Nick Carr, director of marketing for Enterprise Linux at Red
Hat, recently noted that the company is in no hurry to rush the delayed
RHEL 5 out the door since the launch of the product is not a "revenue
event" for the company. By that, he meant that customers who have
active subscriptions for RHEL 3 or RHEL 4 get the new version for free
when it becomes available. Red Hat customers are not paying to use a
particular version of Enterprise Linux, but to subscribe to support
and updates to whichever one is available. That appears to be what
Gartner is suggesting Microsoft may consider in the future.
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