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XML and Web Services In The News - 29 December 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by BEA Systems, Inc.
HEADLINES:
Office Open XML Clears First Standardization Hurdle
Michael A. Silver and Rita E. Knox, Gartner Research Report
A good amount of ink was spilt in 2006 on the topic of competition
between ODF and Office Open XML document. Gartner Research Report
#G00145329 suggests that we should not expect a victor in the format
war until 2008. Excerpt: "On 7 December, 2006, Ecma International voted
to approve Microsoft's Office Open XML document format as an
international standard. Ecma will submit Office Open XML to the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for fast-track
approval. In this latest battle in the format war, Microsoft gained
ground on OpenDocument Format (ODF), which the ISO ratified as a
standard in May 2006. ODF was created by OpenOffice.org and developed
by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards (OASIS). The ISO fast-track approval process likely means that
the ISO will vote on standardization in 2007. The Ecma vote gives Office
Open XML a higher chance of ISO approval. Standards ratification is
important because some organizations, especially governments, prefer to
use products and formats that conform to standards. In the case of
document formats, IBM, Sun Microsystems and others, pushing ODF, got
some government organizations to conclude in 2005 that they needed to
adopt standard document formats to ensure that official documents could
be opened years into the future. These vendors argued that a product
might not be available that could read a document created in a closed,
proprietary format 50 years hence, but if a format was open and
documented, anyone could write an application to manipulate it. This
spurred Microsoft to submit the XML document formats, released with
Office 2007, to Ecma. In 2006, Microsoft opened its proprietary binary
formats and funded an open-source project to create ODF translators for
Office. (1) IBM, the sole dissenter before Ecma, voted against the
certification because it believes: (2) Office Open XML serves
Microsoft's interests first, while ODF serves the broader industry (3)
The Office Open XML format's 6,000-page specification is too large for
anyone to really implement Microsoft argues that the specification is
so large because its software provides a richer feature set than ODF,
it includes customer-defined schema support, it provides backward
compatibility with billions of existing documents and legacy formats,
and the specification grew as a result of other TC45 vendors'
contributions.
See also: the PDF
Using XML Digital Signatures in the 2006 XML Environment
Thomas Roessler (ed), W3C Technical Report
W3C announced the publication of "Using XML Digital Signatures in the
2006 XML Environment" as an updated W3C Working Group Note,
20-December-2006. The document was produced by members of the W3C
XML Core Working Group, and members of the xml-dsig mailing list.
The "Using XML Digital Signatures" document references Canonical XML 1.1,
which revisits assumptions made in the original Canonical XML
specification, and that have subsequently been invalidated by further
developments in the XML area. In particular, the transformations
specified in Canonical XML 1.1 can be applied safely in the presence of
attributes such as 'xml:id' and 'xml:base'. The WG Note "Using XML
Digital Signatures" describes how to use the XML Digital Signature
Recommendation ("XML-Signature Syntax and Processing") in a way
consistent with the present (fall 2006) XML environment. This note
suggests constraints on the use of XML Digital Signature, and relies
on extension points present in the XML Digital Signature Recommendation.
The note however does not override any aspect of XML-DSIG.
See also: the W3C XML Activity Statement
NIST XML Quality of Design Tool
Staff, Technology News
"Similar to HTML, which is used to format web pages, XML allows
computers to exchange information and act on it. Rules called schemas
that stipulate precisely the type of information included in the
document and how to handle it are critical to XML communication. Every
month thousands of new schemas are introduced. Not all of them, however,
are precise enough to transmit the needed information without
misunderstandings. Computer scientists at the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) hope to avoid interoperability problems
caused by poorly designed or imprecise schemas. The NIST engineers have
just released a tool to help others develop well thought out schemas
that are easy to understand, implement, maintain and expand. The test
site contains sets of design rules for schemas as well as tests for the
rules. Visitors to the site can use the rules to check whether a schema
that they are developing or using meets good XML communication
guidelines. Computer engineers skilled in XML are also encouraged to
use the site to share their own rules with others in the XML community.
See also: the NIST QOD web site
Why PUT and DELETE? A Conversation with Elliotte Rusty Harold
Bill Venners, Artima Developer
In this interview, Elliotte Rusty Harold discusses the true meaning of
PUT and DELETE. In "Why REST Failed", Elliotte Rusty Harold described
the difference between the four HTTP verbs GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE,
and praised their virtues: "The beauty of REST is that those four verbs
are all you need. Everything you need to do can be done with GET, PUT,
POST, and DELETE. You don't need to invent a new verb for every operation
you can imagine. This make HTTP scalable, flexible, and extensible.
Simplicity leads to power." He then expressed the problem with the
picture: "The problem is that GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE really are a
minimal set. You truly do need all four, and we only have two; and I've
never understood why. In 2006 browser vendors still don't support PUT
and DELETE." In this interview, Bill Venners asks Harold to explain what
value PUT and DELETE really adds that POST doesn't offer. Elliotte
Rusty Harold: "I would say if you're going to POST to an article to
update it, the real key difference with PUT and POST there, if you're
just adding a paragraph or comment to the article, and it's going down
to the bottom of the page. You're not replacing the entire page, then
yes, you're posting new content to that article. By contrast, if you're
replacing the entire article — all of it; you're sending a completely
new version of the article — then that's a PUT. POST is the most
general thing and I hesitate to say it means anything, because on some
systems it means this. On others it means that. POST is your generic
catch-all, with no real restrictions on what it can do. It is incredibly
powerful, but the principal of least power would suggest that where we
can get away with PUT or DELETE, we do so. If all you have to work with
is POST and GET, you'll probably be OK so long as you're clear about
the difference between those two. You can live without PUT and DELETE,
but it's a somewhat nicer world if we in fact have them.
Something to Look Forward to in WS-BPEL 2.0
Ivana Trickovic, SAP Weblogs
The new 2.0 version of the Web Services Business Process Execution
Language (WS-BPEL) will reach the status Committee Specification soon,
and so will qualify for the approval as an OASIS standard. The question
whether it will be as broadly embraced as its predecessor BPEL4WS
version 1.1 remains to be answered. The 2.0 version introduces a number
of new features, includes a number of improvements and addresses some
shortcomings in version 1.1. These are probably good reasons to decide
in favor of version 2.0. In the latest blog in the series of podcasts
on WS-BPEL a number of changes in WS-BPEL 2.0 compared to BPEL4WS 1.1
have been discussed. In this blog I would like to discuss a particular
one, the 'forEach' activity, in more detail. Typically, business
processes encompass complex interaction patterns. Let us consider a
purchasing scenario, which involves several activities: a consumer
sends a purchase order (PO) to a seller indicating the type, quantity
and agreed price for each product to be ordered. The seller loops over
the list of items included in the PO and sends for each item a purchase
order to a supplier. These requests could be sent to one supplier or
to different suppliers. Since these interactions with suppliers are
same, but independent activities, they could be modeled as parallel
activities. Moreover, the number of interactions is not known at design
time, but depends on the number of items included in the PO. The WS-BPEL
snippet [here included, a fragment of the process on the seller's side]
shows how this complex interaction pattern could be modeled using the
2.0 version. This version introduces the 'forEach' activity for
supporting parallel execution of multiple instances of the same set of
activities.
See also: WS-BPEL references
New Creative Commons Head to Reach Out to Businesses
Martyn Williams, InfoWorld
Creative Commons, the grass-roots content licensing system that has
taken hold amongst bloggers and other content creators online, could
soon be arriving in your digital camera. The organization behind the
increasingly popular licenses is already talking to consumer
electronics companies about getting the system embedded in content
creation tools and its new chairman, Tokyo-based venture-capitalist
Joichi Ito, sees cozying up to big business as an essential next-step
for Creative Commons. Both Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. offer the ability
to search for Creative Commons-tagged content while Microsoft Corp.
threw in its support in June 2006 when the company released a plug-in
for the Office suite that allows users to embed Creative Commons
licenses in documents they create. The first document released with
the new tool was a speech given by Brazilian Minister of Culture
Gilberto Gil at iSummit 2006, a digital media conference that was
held in Toronto. The Creative Commons licenses don't impact copyright
but allow users a way to offer others limited rights to their content
under certain conditions. There are a handful of main licenses that,
for example, allow others to reuse work on condition it's attributed
and for noncommercial purposes or to modify works as long as they
give credit for the original and share the resulting work with the
community. Right now the licenses aren't embedded in content as
standard but Ito hopes this will change. "When you switch on your
camera it should ask 'what license is this video going to be?'. Every
creation tool, delivery tool, distribution tool, display tool, all
those things should be Creative Commons aware. And for that, it needs
to make sense to those making these tools, which are usually
businesses."
See also: Creative Commons references
Google Project Targets Program Crashes
Brian Prince, eWEEK
In this article, Google Software Engineer Mark Mentovai discusses
"Airbag," the company's open-source project to handle crash reports
on different platforms. Program crashes are an unfortunate fact of
life for software developers. But to protect against crashes,
developers need to know which programs are crashing and how often.
Mentovai: "We needed a library like this here at Google, and my
colleague Brian Ryner and I decided it would be beneficial to other
developers and open-source projects. A great example is Mozilla
Firefox. Firefox is a large application with a lot of users, so
scalability was also a concern. There are some commercial packages
that provide crash-reporting systems, but there really isn't
anything that a cross-platform open-source project can leverage. We
wanted to change that. As we began working, we realized that the bulk
of the work had to do with the nitty-gritty technical details, and
that we could reach a wider audience by conquering those problems in
a general way and allowing developers the freedom to choose how to
integrate Airbag into their own products. Right now, we have a fully
functional server-side library that can handle crash reports from
any PowerPC or x86-based platform as long as the reports are packaged
in the format we're using. The library is a 'middle layer' that
processes the crash dump after it is received. Developers can then
store the processed reports as they see fit. On the client side, we
have complete implementations for Mac OS X and Windows. We also have
a very substantial portion of a Linux implementation. These are the
three operating systems we plan to support initially, although it
shouldn't be difficult to write an Airbag client for another system
if a developer is familiar with the target system and with Airbag. A
crash-reporting system built around Airbag can examine crash data to
determine which crashes seem to be occurring most frequently in
real-world situations. Because Airbag can tell developers which
crashes users are experiencing, and can provide clues as to why
they're occurring, it can have a very positive impact on software
stability.
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