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XML and Web Services In The News - 28 December 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by BEA Systems, Inc.
HEADLINES:
Updated IETF Internet Draft: The Atom Publishing Protocol
Joe Gregorio and Bill de hOra (eds), IETF Internet Draft
Members of the IETF atompub Working Group have released an updated
version of the "Atom Publishing Protocol" specification, companion to
"The Atom Syndication Format", published as an IETF Request for
Comments #4287 in December 2005. The Atom Publishing Protocol is an
application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources
using HTTP and XML 1.0. The protocol supports the creation of
arbitrary Web resources and provides facilities for: (1) Collections:
Sets of resources, which can be retrieved in whole or in part. (2)
Service: Discovering and describing Collections. (3) Editing: Creating,
updating and deleting resources. Atom Protocol Document formats are
specified in terms of the XML Information Set. The Atom Publishing
Protocol uses HTTP methods to author Member Resources as follows: [a]
GET is used to retrieve a representation of a known resource. [b]
POST is used to create a new, dynamically-named, resource. When the
client submits non-Atom-Entry representations to a Collection for
creation, two resources are always created &mdsh; a Media Entry for the
requested resource, and a Media Link Entry for metadata (in Atom Entry
format) about the resource. [c] PUT is used to update a known resource.
[d] DELETE is used to remove a known resource. The draft document only
covers the creation, update and deletion of Entry and Media resources.
Other resources can be created, updated, and deleted as the result of
manipulating a Collection, but the number of those resources, their
mime-types, and effects of Atom Protocol operations on them are
outside the scope of this specification. Along with operations on
Member Resources, the Atom Protocol defines Collection Resources for
managing and organizing Member Resources. Collections are represented
by Atom Feed documents and contain the IRIs of, and metadata about,
their Member Resources. The Atom Protocol does not make a distinction
between Feeds used for Collections and other Atom Feeds. The only
mechanism that this specification supplies for distinguishing a
Collection Feed is its appearance in a Service Document. [Note: the
diff version reports 85 change blocks, 459 lines changed or added.]
See also: Atom references
amplee: A Python Library Implementing the Atom Publishing Protocol
Sylvain Hellegouarch, IETF atom-protocol List Announcement
An announcement was posted for the release of amplee 0.3.6 — called
'alpha', but "... you can be safe and use it already as it stands; it
should soon move to beta." amplee is a Python implementation of the
Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), as specified in draft 11 or later.
amplee's aim is to provide an API close to the APP specification
which can be used in any Python code, and HTTP handlers to make it
easy to integrate an APP store into a web application. amplee has
different levels and can be used in a number of ways: (1) At a minimum
it's just a pure Python library implementing the Atom Publishing
protocol. In that case the API model is almost a 1-to-1 mapping of
the APP spec. Modules in the amplee.atompub package include [a] store:
APP does not define the meaning of store. We use that concept to
describe the outter envelop that carries related APP entities. A store
is the layer between the underlying storage (database, filesystem, etc.)
with APP entities; [b] service: amplee attaches a service entity to a
store. A service also has a list of workspaces it handles; [c]
workspace: a workspace belongs to one service and has a list of
collections; [d] collection: amplee collection module allows CRUD
operations to be made on members. (2) It has built-in members for common
data type such as XHTML, audio formats (MP3, Ogg, Flac, WavPack) or
Open Document Text format. (3) You can also use built-in storages to
persist members of a collection. Currently supported: filesystem,
subversion, zodb, and database backend via dejavu. amplee is distributed
under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike2.5 License.
See also: Atom Protocol Python Group
Converter Enables Conversion Between ODF and Chinese Document Format (UOF)
D.C. Parris, LXer Linux News
Peking University recently released a program to convert office
documents between OpenDocument Format and the Specification for the
Chinese office file format based on XML (UOF for short). Both standards
are XML office document standards, UOF being a "National Standard of
the People's Republic of China". The converter, which took nearly a year
to complete, enables users to convert text, spreadsheet and presentation
documents between ODF and UOF. The project's team members learned from
IBM's OpenDocument Format experts, and at times, worked closely with
them in resolving challenges. The team also participated in the UOF
technical committee, providing insight into the differences between the
two formats. Their participation in the project led to the adoption of
several proposals by the UOF committee to integrate some of ODF's
advantages into the UOF standard. Consequently, conversion between the
two formats improved as well. The converter is licensed under the terms
of the GNU Lesser General Public License. Ensuring a Free/Open Source
solution was one of the goals of the project. Being able to convert
documents properly between ODF and UOF should be a boon to millions of
computer users, especially those using the Chinese national standard.
The converter is known to work with OpenOffice.org and EIOffice 2007.
See also: Rob Weir
SOA Standards SCA and SDO Homeless for Holidays
Rich Seeley, SearchWebServices.com
SCA and SDO, emerging standards designed to provide programming models
developers could use in creating Web services, have yet to fully
mature and reach a standards body, but 2007 appears to be the year
they will. Hopes were raised this past July that SCA/SDO would find a
standards home for Christmas. Open SOA (OSOA), the vendor group,
including IBM, BEA Systems Inc. and Oracle Corp., which is currently
working on the standards, indicated last summer that they would make
a decision on a standards body by the end of 2006. Now, it appears it
will be sometime in 2007. In response to an e-mail request for an
update on the status of SCA/SDO, Graham J Barber, program director,
SOA partnerships at IBM and an editor working on the specifications,
wrote: "We intend to take the main SCA specifications to a 'Version
One' level around the end of the first quarter of 2007. It's our
expectation then that these specs, together with the published V2.1
SDO specifications will be handed to a standards body for future
stewardship." Whether or not it is fully mature or blessed by a
standards body, SCA is already being incorporated into vendor products,
and Ted Farrell, chief architect and vice president of tools and
middleware at Oracle, says it's usable now. SCA is already included
in Oracle WebCenter Suite, designed for developers working on SOA and
Web 2.0 projects, he said. Rogue Wave Software, a division of Quovadx,
Inc. announced earlier this month that is had incorporated SDO,
including adding it to the product name, in its SOA tool suite,
HydraSDO. [Ted] Farrell said SCA/SDO are following a similar path
to Business Process Execution Langauge (BPEL). It was a combined effort
of IBM and Microsoft, then joined by BEA, SAP AG and Siebel Systems,
which is now part of Oracle. In 2003, those vendors then submitted
BPEL for Web services (BPEL4WS) 1.1 to the OASIS open standards
organization, which has advanced the renamed standard to its current
form as WS-BPEL 2.0. Developers and architects working on SOA projects
need to work with standards as they are today and should not wait for
all of them to mature and become official, argues Peter S. Kastner,
vice president enterprise integration for the Aberdeen Group, a
Harte-Hanks Company. He believes those working on SOA projects will
have to evolve with the standards.
See also: the 2005 announcement
Grid for Particle Physics Project Coming Together
Jon Brodkin, IDG News Service
Research data gleaned from beams of protons colliding 40 million times
a second inside the largest scientific instrument ever built will soon
begin flowing into an international network of computer centers designed
for scientists trying to uncover the underlying structure of the
universe. Physicists hope the project will find evidence that could lead
to the discovery of extra dimensions, and evidence for the Higgs boson,
a theoretical particle that has never been observed but which scientists
believe endows all objects with mass. In late 2007, the Large Hadron
Collider will open at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in
Geneva, Switzerland, and produce proton collisions that will create
various types of subatomic particles. Five regional computer centers in
the United States are among those being set up to analyze the Hadron data.
One operated by the University of Chicago and Indiana University is now
up and running. Overall, the project involves 158 institutions in 35
nations. The collaborative center is already analyzing test data in
preparation for the launch of the Hadron Collider, which is the
centerpiece of an experiment known as ATLAS (A Toroidal Large Hadron
Collider Apparatus). Data will be distributed worldwide using grid
computing, the use of geographically distributed computing resources.
ATLAS data will flow from Switzerland to 11 'Tier-1' centers worldwide,
including Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. The Tier-1
centers will then distribute data to Tier-2 centers, including the
Chicago-Indiana center and four others in America.
Amsterdam Tests Open Source Software
Peter Sayer, InfoWorld
Microsoft Corporation has two years in which to convince Amsterdam city
authorities that it can offer better value for money on the desktop
than open source alternatives. The city will conduct tests of open
source software on desktops in two departments in the first half of
2007. It doesn't intend to phase out the use of proprietary software
completely, but expects the tests to lead to a reduction in the scope
of its contract with Microsoft, its current desktop software supplier,
the city said. That contract expires at the end of 2008. Two
departments, the city's housing service, and the local authority for
the borough of Zeeburg, will test the Linux operating system on desktop
PCs, city authority spokeswoman Marjolijn van Goethem said Thursday. A
study conducted for the city council earlier this year showed that the
use of open software ensures better exchange and storage of digital
information. Amsterdam is not alone in considering the switch from
proprietary to open source desktops: The German city of Munich is in
the process of migrating desktop PCs to the Linux operating system.
Other local and national administrations around Europe have cited
safeguarding access to their own data as a reason for preferring
software based on open source and open standards over proprietary
applications. The Belgian government voted earlier this year to adopt
the Open Document Format (ODF) popularized by the open-source desktop
productivity suite OpenOffice.org for document storage and exchange,
while authorities in France and Denmark are also evaluating the
benefits of ODF.
See also: ODF references
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