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XML and Web Services In The News - 23 January 2007
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Sun Microsystems
HEADLINES:
W3C Publishes Eight New Standards in the XML Family
Staff, World Wide Web Consortium Announcement
W3C has announced the release of eight (8) Recommendations, representing
some eight years of work by members of the W3C XSL Working Group and XML
Query Working Group, with widespread implementation experience and
extensive feedback from users and vendors. These eight new standards in
the XML Family support the ability to query, transform, and access XML
data and documents. The primary specifications are "XQuery 1.0: An XML
Query Language", "XSL Transformations (XSLT) 2.0", and XML Path Language
(XPath) 2.0". These new Web Standards will play a significant role in
enterprise computing by connecting databases with the Web. XQuery allows
data mining of everything from memos and Web service messages to multi-
terabyte relational databases. XSLT 2.0 adds significant new
functionality to the already widely deployed XSLT 1.0, which enables
the transformation and styled presentation of XML documents. Both
specifications rely on XPath 2.0, also significantly enriched from its
previous version. The W3C Working Groups have addressed thousands of
comments from implementers and the interested public to ensure that the
specifications meet the needs of diverse communities. The XML Query
Working Group catalogued over forty implementations of XQuery and
reported on how fourteen of them satisfy a test suite consisting of more
than 14,000 test cases, demonstrating unprecedented levels of
interoperability. XML Query is already available in products from all of
the major relational database vendors as well as in XML-native database
systems, middleware, XML editing systems and numerous open source
products. W3C Member organizations have also announced implementations
of XQuery or plans for implementations. Years of experience with the
language have culminated in an impressive list of new features in XSLT
2.0 and XPath 2.0, including a greatly enlarged library of functions,
new facilities for grouping and aggregation, and more powerful text
processing using regular expressions. XSLT 2.0 can optionally use XML
Schema, enabling improved detection of errors both at compile time and
at run-time, and thus provides the robustness needed in enterprise
applications. Implementations of the new specification have been
available since 2002, maturing in parallel with the specification. With
over 150,000 downloads of various implementations, there is a wealth
of experience demonstrating the benefits of the new features. Indeed,
many organizations, from publishing houses to investment banks, are
already using XSLT 2.0 in their operational systems.
See also: XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0
Sun, Intel to Partner on Server Chips
Jordan Robertson, Forbes
Sun Microsystems Inc. will begin building a line of servers that run
on chips from Intel Corp. and will receive Intel's endorsement of Sun's
Solaris operating system. The long-term alliance, announced by Sun
Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Schwartz and Intel CEO Paul Otellini,
was seen as a sizable victory for both companies as they fend off
threats from competitors in the high-margin server market. Sun, which
plans to begin shipping the Intel-based products in the first half of
this year, said the companies are currently working on ways to improve
and expand the market presence of Solaris. The deal marks a major
design win for Intel. The world's largest chip maker has been fighting
to reverse plunging profits and regain market share lost to archrival
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD stole more than 5 percent of the
overall chip market away from Intel in the past year, according to
Mercury Research. The alliance also is a sizable victory for Sun as
the company continues its long climb back to profitability following
the dot-com collapse and seeks more mainstream adoption of its servers
and software products. The Santa Clara-based company, which is
scheduled to report its quarterly financial results Tuesday, has lost
more than $5 billion since 2002, after tech-related spending dried up
and demand plummeted for high-priced servers like Sun's. Analysts said
Sun should get a major boost from Intel's endorsement of the Solaris
operating system because many servers that use chips based on the x86
design often now run rival operating systems, namely Linux or Microsoft
Corp.'s Windows.
See also: the announcement
Liberty Alliance Plugs Open Source Drive
Joris Evers, Silicon.com
The Liberty Alliance has announced an effort to spur adoption of its
specifications in open source applications. The industry organisation
has created the "OpenLiberty Project" to provide tools and information
for developing applications that use the Liberty Federation and Liberty
Web Services standards. The Liberty Alliance was formed in 2001 to
develop standards for online verification of identity. Jason Roualt,
vice president of Liberty Alliance, said in an interview: "The idea
behind OpenLiberty is to provide a community for open source developers
to communicate and collaborate on open identity standards. There are a
few open source efforts around identity but the main thing that they are
missing is the ability to support identity-based web services, getting
beyond single sign-on to sharing identity attributes." For example, the
Liberty Alliance specifications could let an application find an
individual's calendar service to schedule an appointment or a person's
wallet service to initiate a transaction, Roualt said. "That is part of
ID-WSF [Identity Web Services Framework] but that is not being addressed
specifically by open source efforts." From the web site description:
"openLiberty.org was established to provide easy access to tools and
information to jump start the development of more secure and privacy-
respecting identity-based applications based on Liberty Federation and
Liberty Web Services standards. From solutions that support a single
identity-based transaction to enterprise and government systems
requiring the highest degree of security and privacy protection,
openLiberty.org will help you more easily build and deploy a wide range
of new relying party (identity-consuming) applications. We welcome your
participation and together we will deliver ubiquitous interoperability
at the identity layer..."
See also: OpenLiberty
IDEs for Web Services: Eclipse
William Brogden, SearchWebServices.com
Probably the best known open source IDE (Integrated Development
Environment) is Eclipse. Originally developed by IBM starting in the
late 1990s as a development tools platform in Java, it was released to
open source licensing in 2001. An organization, the Eclipse Consortium,
was created with support from IBM and eight other high tech companies.
In order to dispel the impression that some developers had that Eclipse
was too much under IBM control, a totally independent not-for-profit
organization, the Eclipse Foundation, with its own staff and budget, was
created in 2004. Starting with Eclipse 3.1, the popular JUnit toolkit
is built in. If you favor Test Driven Development you will find it
easy to create test cases in Eclipse. Web service support uses the
Apache Axis project version 1.3 for SOAP-related methods and WSDL4J
(Web Services Description Language for Java) version 1.5.1 for
manipulation of WSDL documents. Note that this is not the absolutely
latest version of Axis as there has been a major redesign for Axis2.
The version of the Tomcat Web server provided with Eclipse is also
several generations behind the latest. The Eclipse project has a
single convenient download package for those who would like to
investigate the tools for Web-related applications. The over 200mb
zipped download includes the basic core platform plus a large number
of preconfigured plug-ins. The Web Standard Tools collection of
plug-ins contains tools for manipulation of documents related to
specifications published by organizations such as the W3C. For example,
there are tools for manipulating XML, XSD, DTD and WSDL documents.
Lotus to Put Notes, Domino 8 into Public Beta
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
At its Lotusphere conference on January 22, 2006, IBM's Lotus division
announced that it will soon release a public beta version of its Notes
and Domino 8 technology. Company officials said the technology,
formerly code-named Hannover, will enter public beta in February, and
that will be the final beta testing phase of the product before it
ships midyear. IBM officials said the development process for Notes
and Domino 8 has included one of the most comprehensive testing programs
in Lotus history, opening up the technology to a vast number of
potential testers. The result is a new Notes and Domino product that
delivers enhancements to e-mail, calendar and contact management
applications; access to spreadsheets, presentations and documents; and
a shareable activities center. Notes 8 offers a standards-based work
environment and features support for ODF (Open Document Format), giving
users access to office tools without the cost of a separate license.
With IBM Productivity Editors, users can create, edit and save a variety
of documents in ODF format, including word processing, spreadsheet and
presentation documents. The Productivity Editors also allow a user to
import and export supported file formats used by Microsoft Office and
Open Office file formats, edit those files, and save them in either
the original format or as ODF documents, IBM said. Also, the new version
of the Lotus tools support open standards and cross-platform usability
with a native look and feel: The Lotus Notes 8 client can run on many
supported operating systems, including Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
Based on the Eclipse standard, Notes 8 has been designed to give users
a native experience on each of the platforms. The Domino 8 server also
runs on a wide variety of operating systems: Windows, Linux, AIX, Sun
Solaris, iSeries and zSeries. Inspired by IBM researchers and
developed by Lotus, Activities uses Web 2.0 technologies such as
Backpack, ATOM, Tagging, REST (Representational State Transfer), AJAX
(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)
to deliver a lightweight, Web-based collaboration offering. Activities
is also a core component in Lotus Connections, Lotus' new social
software portfolio, empowering users to add structure to tasks that
are informal and highly collaborative.
See also: the web site
Oracle Sows the Seeds for SOA
James R. Borck, InfoWorld
Oracle SOA Suite 10g Release 3 packs an Oracle ESB (Enterprise Service
Bus) for message routing, enrichment, and transformation with good
adapters available for plugging into most any existing transport or ERP
system in use. And, the Oracle BPEL Process Manager provides an
orchestration engine based on native BPEL (Business Process Execution
Language) with tools to easily string together complex business flows,
human workflow, and exception management. Topping the stack are the
OWSM (Oracle Web Services Manager) — locking down services with sturdy
security and policy management — and an easy-to-use rules facility,
Oracle Business Rules Engine, for processing business logic and
authoring customizable rule sets. Although Oracle SOA Suite does run
Oracle's application server, a number of additional app servers are
gearing up for certification. And, the BAM, OWSM, and BPEL PM apps can
all be used to manage third-party infrastructure, as well. Oracle
includes Oracle JDeveloper for its IDE, but Eclipse will also do the
job nicely. There remains some room for improvement, certainly. The
BAM module is currently Windows-only, and globalization/localization
across the platform needs improvement. The BPEL Designer for
orchestrating services, though great for developers, lacks analyst
appeal and would be enhanced by efforts to round out autonomous access
for the business-focused. And, the multiple Enterprise Manager
interfaces required to administer the suite belies an otherwise well-
integrated composition. I would like to see more non tech-driven
interface development tools, such as those available in BEA's AquaLogic
User Interaction suite, and more of the distributed process debugging,
dependency mapping, and integrated WS-standards found in Sonic SOA
Suite. But, unlike Sonic, Oracle standardizes on the open BPEL (with
minor extension) for orchestration. For development you'll want to
take advantage of the BPEL PM Process Designer plug-in for JDeveloper.
Despite some minor nits in the interface and lacking simulation, its
drag-and-drop process activities and easy configuration wizardry made
quick work of flow construction. And, XSLT transforms were easy to map,
as well. Zoomable diagrams and swim lanes for easy delineation of
process ownership further simplified development and debugging.
Master Foo and the Naming Ceremony
Sean McGrath, ITworld.com
What is the difference between a numbering and naming an object?',
Master Foo asked. Sensing a possibly important nugget of wisdom from
the great man, the less socially adept disciples cocked their PDAs
into handwriting recognition mode. 'Well, a name is descriptive.',
said the spokesperson. 'Numbers are just opaque identifiers; devoid of
meaning; bereft of semantics; empty vessels of nominalism.' 'Indeed
so -- and quite poetically put', said Master Foo. 'Truly useful objects
have descriptions that change depending on the perceiver.' 'How can
perceiving an object change its description?' 'Viewing an object from
different contexts, different time-lines, different cultures,
different points of view, result in different natural descriptions of
the object.' 'Yes', said the spokesperson, getting into the swing of
things. 'One person's book is another person's chapter. One person's
integer is is another person's social security number. One person's
debit is another person's credit. An object can have as many names as
there are points of view I guess. And come to think of it, any
description you might pick today can be out of date tomorrow...'
'Indeed!', said Master Foo. The frequency of his beard-stroking
increasing perceptibly. 'To give something a descriptive name is to
create a semantic hostage to fortune. If you are lucky the descriptive
name may be simply irrelevant in the future. If you are unlucky, the
descriptive name will be positively misleading in the future.'
Larry Rosen Takes the Internet Engineering Task Force to Task Over
Patent Policy
Dan Farber, Larry Dignan, and David Berlind, ZDNet News Blog
Larry Rosen, the man who wrote the book on Open Source Licensing, has
penned an open letter to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
regarding the formalization of a policy that paves the way for patented
technologies to become IETF standards. The IETF is the organization
that sets the standards for most internetworking technologies. For
example, the standards for Internet email (SMTP), network management
(SNMP), Ethernet, and WiFi (actually Wireless Ethernet) are all IETF-
ratified standards. Should the IETF open the door to any encumbrance
of its standards by virtue of patents, an IETF patent-laden standard
would be the equivalent of giving the patent(s) holders control over
some future part of the Internet (essentially annointing a monopoly).
A more acceptable policy would be for the IETF to require patent
holders to issue a permanent patent grant to anybody wishing to
implement the affected standards. As you can see from Rosen's open
letter (below), he's particularly sensitive to the potential impact
on open source developers. Without patent grants that allow anybody
including open source developers to "practice" a patent, it's
virtually impossible to for an open source developer to create an
implementation of that patent and then share that implementation with
others (as is often the practice in the open source community. If
practicing a patent requires a license from the patent holder (and
that license doesn't allow for any sub-licensing — a condition that
comes at the discretion of the licensor), it creates a road-block to
the most fundamental aspect of both open source and free software.
This isn't Rosen's first such open letter regarding the intellectual
property policies of an organization or consortium that oversees the
development of de jure or de facto standards. Back in 2005, Rosen
organized a boycott against OASIS after that organization adopted a
similarly liberal intellectual property policy.
See also: Patents and Open Standards
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