|
XML and Web Services In The News - 4 January 2007
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by IBM Corporation
HEADLINES:
Introducing XML Internationalization
Hernan Silberman, IBM developerWorks
XML has become a trusted technology to represent and transmit
information of all kinds. XML's designers were visionary in making
XML flexible enough to support multiple languages and character
encodings-features which make it especially suited for applications that
work in multiple locales. Today, XML is the fundamental technology
driving the internationalization of applications in the increasingly
flat world. But do you really understand the concepts of
internationalization and localization? Internationalization is a
design approach which anticipates the adaptation of a product to
multiple different geographic regions and cultures. Localization is the
act of specializing a product for a specific locale, a task that is
much easier if it follows an internationalization effort. You saw that
XML was designed to support international use and thrives because of
its support for multiple character encodings and Unicode, and because
of the xml:lang tag which can be used to identify the language used in
a given document. Recent developments in XML internationalization
include the development of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS),
which provides a standard set of tags for identifying the portions of
a document that need to be translated and various additional tools
which enable internationalization of XML documents. This article
explains what they are, how they work, and why you want to use them
See also: the Internationalization Tag Set
HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring: WebDAV
Lisa Dusseault (ed), IETF Internet Draft
The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) announced receipt of a
new WebDAV HTTP Extensions submission for consideration as a Proposed
Standard. The Internet Dtaft has been produced by members of the IETF
WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WEBDAV) Working Group. The
IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits final
comments on this action. The "HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring
- WebDAV" specification consists of a set of methods, headers, and
content-types ancillary to HTTP/1.1 for the management of resource
properties, creation and management of resource collections, URL
namespace manipulation, and resource locking (collision avoidance).
While the status codes provided by HTTP/1.1 are sufficient to describe
most error conditions encountered by WebDAV methods, there are some
errors that do not fall neatly into the existing categories. This
specification defines new status codes developed for WebDAV methods
and describes existing HTTP status codes as used in WebDAV. Since some
WebDAV methods may operate over many resources, the Multi-Status
response section has been introduced to return status information for
multiple resources. Finally, this version of WebDAV introduces
precondition and postcondition XML elements in error response bodies.
WebDAV uses XML for property names and some values, and also uses XML
to marshal complicated request and response. This specification
contains DTD and text definitions of all all properties and all other
XML elements used in marshalling. WebDAV includes a few special rules
on extending WebDAV XML marshalling in backwards-compatible ways.
Finishing off the specification are sections on what it means for a
resource to be compliant with this specification, on
internationalization support, and on security. While the WEBDAV
working group was originally chartered to produce a draft standard
update to RFC 2518, this documented is being targeted as a replacement
Proposed Standard because of a number of substantive changes to the
original semantics. These are summarized in Appendix F, but a full
review of the document is required to see the entire scope.
See also: WebDAV Resources
The XQuery Chimera Takes Center Stage
Simon St. Laurent, XML.com
For the first time in many years, I left an XML conference thinking
that XML might actually finally change the Web significantly — and
soon. XML still isn't likely to change the Web much on the client side,
beyond the role it plays in Ajax and related technologies. Even that
role is likely to be reduced by JSON. The dreams of XML hypertext are
dead, or at least thoroughly dormant. The changes I saw at XML 2006
that are driving XML deeper into the Web seem likely, for now, to
operate mostly on the server side, as XQuery both brings XML databases
to a wider audience and combines access to relational data and XML.
XML has never worked neatly with the heart of most web applications'
architecture, the relational database. XML's hierarchical structures
map poorly to relational database structures. You can, of course,
create table- and record-like documents that fit easily with relational
databases, but that's a fairly tiny if important subset of XML
possibilities and documents. Web applications built on relational
databases can and do use XML, of course. Applications routinely
generate XML from query results, and import XML documents by shredding
them into pieces spread across tables. The more complicated the
document, the more likely that multiple tables will be involved, or
that it will prove easier to store the XML as a BLOB or a separate
file. Relational databases aren't likely to go away any time soon,
however. They're far too good at storing structured data, scale better
than the alternatives, and offer much more flexibility than most people
know what to do with. XQuery can work with them; it just offers new
options, making it easier to optimize among relational databases for
structured data and other kinds of data storage for more loosely
structured hierarchical data... XQuery itself isn't about the Web —
it's about collecting information from various sources. However, it
also provides templating facilities like those of XSLT, and is
perfectly capable of generating XML or HTML. Where traditional
scripting languages have split querying from the application and
presentation logic, XQuery lets developers combine the query with the
result generation... XQuery use has another side benefit: cleaner XML
than that produced by a lot of current scripts. XML well-formedness is
a natural side-effect of using XQuery, and even with the mixing of
presentation and query layers, converting XQuery that generates HTML
to XQuery that generates XML is not particularly difficult. Perhaps
this will accelerate the shift toward making data available without
an HTML wrapper.
See also: W3C XQuery references
UBL Methodology for Code-list and Value Validation
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Reviews
Ken Holman sent me copy of the latest draft of the OASIS/UBL
Methodology for Code-list and Value Validation, which is a pretty good
use of Schematron. It looks like a neat and workable solution to a
problem that is somewhere between baroque and a hard place using XSD.
Imagine you are a trading company: you have documents which various
fields for countries: countries you can send from, countries you can
send to, countries the US won't allow you to export to, countries you
can use as hubs, countries with regional offices, etc. And you also
have lots of other documents with similar or different sets of countries.
And countries are only the start: you also have product codes where
different fields can have different sets of codes, and so on. And this
may vary according to where the document came from (the Libyan branch
office may have different rules from the Alaskan branch office). And,
of course, the values of codes may have interdependencies, such as "the
source must be different from the destination." So lots of uses of a
standard vocabulary, but lots of local and changing subsets that are
much closer to "business rules" than "datatypes". If you used XML
Schemas, you could theoretically derive by restriction all the different
subset codes, then use "redefine" on every top-level element that used
the subsets. You'd have to do this redefine on base types where possible,
so that subsequent derived types would inherit the restriction, perhaps,
except then you'd have to check that any subsequent derived types that
themselves define restrictions are indeed subsets. Have a breakdown
and a good cup of tea. With the Schematron approach, you select the
items from the code list you want, and some magic tool provided by the
methodology generates the Schematron code, which just uses simple XPaths.
See also: Code List Representation Requirements
Patch Issued for OpenOffice.org WMF Vulnerability
Jeremy Kirk, LinuxWorld.com
A patch has been widely released for a vulnerability in the
OpenOffice.org productivity suite, a problem rated as "highly critical"
by one security vendor. The flaw could be exploited by creating a
malicious file in the Windows Metafile (WMF) or Enhanced Metafile (EMF)
formats. If the file was opened by a user, it could start running
unauthorized code on a computer, according to an advisory by Linux
distribution vendor Red Hat, which offers the OpenOffice suite with
several of its products. OpenOffice.org is a free software suite that
includes a word processor, spreadsheet and a presentation program. Red
Hat rated the flaw as only "important" since a user would have to open
a malicious file, Cox said. Red Hat users will either receive an update
automatically or notification to upgrade their software, he added.
Secunia, however, rated the vulnerability as "highly critical," a rank
of "four" on a five-number scale of increasing severity. The WMF format
proved problematic for OpenOffice.org's rival in 2006. After pressure
from its customers, Microsoft issued an out-of-cycle patch early last
year for its operating systems after widespread attempts to exploit a
WMF vulnerability. The flaw — one of the top security problems of 2006
— also left Windows systems vulnerable to running code if a malicious
WMF was opened.
Rogue Wave Software Adds New Partners for Rogue Wave Hydra Suite
Staff, SOA WebServices News Desk
Rogue Wave Software announced that it has entered into a partnership
agreement with CIBER, Inc. granting CIBER the ability to provide
integration and implementation services for Rogue Wave Hydra including
support, consulting and training. This marks the seventh partnership
agreement completed to extend the sale of Rogue Wave Software's high
performance Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework, Rogue Wave
Hydra, and related components. Rogue Wave Hydra empowers IT architects
and professional developers to achieve order-of-magnitude performance
and throughput improvements for critical software applications. Rogue
Wave Hydra is based on Rogue Wave Software's pioneering 'Software
Pipelines' technology and associated methodology, which focuses on
achieving efficiency and scalability through concurrent computing and
parallel processing. Software Pipelines allow for efficient execution
and distribution of software components or services for concurrent
processing on available resources. This peer-to-peer architecture
minimizes bottlenecks and allows businesses to achieve new levels of
throughput and performance. Rogue Wave Hydra also supports the Service
Component Architecture or SCA specification and is the first high-
performance SOA development framework that complements key concepts
of the SCA architecture, including cross-platform components,
tightly-and loosely-coupled service components, Web service standards,
BPEL and Service Data Objects (SDO). Future releases of Rogue Wave
Hydra will add further support for SCA application programming
interfaces, or APIs, and will be compatible with future products from
other vendors, while providing specialized capabilities for
high-performance application requirements.
See also: HydraSDO
Analyst Predicts Eightfold Increase in New Storage Capacity by 2012
Chris Preimesberger, eWEEK
Data storage analyst and consultant Coughlin Associates will reveal a
survey report Jan. 6 at the Storage Visions conference in Las Vegas
that predicts an eightfold increase in new digital storage capacity and
the doubling of storage-related revenues over the next six years. The
Atascadero, Calif.-based firm's 130-plus-page, fourth annual report on
data storage and the entertainment market — the 2007 Entertainment
Content Creation and Digital Storage Report — indicates that the
strong growth in digital storage demand is driven by higher-resolution
content creation and distribution as well as archiving and digital
preservation. The report analyzes requirements and trends in worldwide
data storage for entertainment content acquisition; editing; archiving
and digital preservation; as well as digital cinema, broadcast,
satellite, cable, network and VOD distribution. Capacity and performance
trends are presented and media projections are made for each of the
various market segments, a Coughlin spokesperson said. Industry storage
capacity and revenue projections include direct attached storage,
on-line as well as near-line network storage. Market share for content
creation storage hardware for these three categories of storage systems
are given for 2006. About 54 percent of the total storage capacity was
used for content archiving and preservation in 2006. This is expected
to increase to 72 percent by 2012.
XML.org is an OASIS Information Channel
sponsored by BEA Systems, Inc., IBM Corporation, Innodata Isogen, SAP AG and Sun
Microsystems, Inc.
Use http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage
to unsubscribe or change an email address. See http://xml.org/xml/news_market.shtml
for the list archives. |
