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XML and Web Services In The News - 09 March 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML.org Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
OIO Service Oriented Infrastructure: Exchange of Business Messages Over the Internet
Danish Government, Public Review Draft
The OIO (Offentlig Information Online) Service Oriented Infrastructure
is an initiative by the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and
Innovation, designed with the aim to establish a framework for the
exchange of business documents over the internet in a secure and reliable
fashion. A Public Review Draft version 0.8 has been released as a set
of seven documents, including a general OIO Architecture, Business
Profile, OWSA Profile for Message Level Security, OWSA Reliability,
OWSA Signature, Basic Profile, and Address Resolving Service. The
initiative is primarily targeted at small and medium sized business,
and public government. The initiative comprises three elements: (1)
An addressing mechanism which enables lookup of service providers and
their endpoints; service registration is based on CVR-numbers and
possibly EAN location numbers; (2) A web service profile, or a so-called
interoperability profile; this profile is a specification of a collection
of web service standards, assembled on the basis of a set of business
requirements; (3) A software toolkit and a client reference implementation
being a so-called message handler. The software toolkit is implemented
on both the Java and .Net platforms, in order that software vendors and
system integrators in the easiest possible way can offer endpoint lookup
with the addressing mechanism, and exchange of business documents in
accordance with the profile. Denmark adopted UBL two years ago, and the
infrastructure initiative uses UBL bindings.
See also: Danish XML Committee
Review: TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.3
Lori MacVittie, NetworkComputing.com
TIBCO's BusinessWorks relies on its messaging know-how to deliver its
integrated SOA suite. As with IBM and Sonic Software, messaging is a
large part of TIBCO's SOA message. We didn't find this surprising --
TIBCO's Rendezvous, along with IBM's and Sonic's MQ implementations,
are well known and widely implemented across a variety of industries.
TIBCO, like Sonic and IBM, considers SOA a deployment strategy and an
extension of integration rather than a replacement for conventional EAI
implementations. TIBCO's bus backbone, like Sonic's, is JMS-based,
taking advantage of TIBCO's EMS product. Unlike Sonic, TIBCO lets the
customer choose the underlying transport; we could replace EMS with
another messaging backbone, such as SonicMQ or IBM's MQSeries, or go
with a completely HTTP-based backbone. BusinessWorks requires a runtime
agent, as do all TIBCO products, to enable centralized management from
its Web administration console. BW Designer, TIBCO's design-time
environment is, like most non-Eclipse-based design-time products we
tested, moving to Eclipse in a forthcoming release. Apache is used to
handle Web services endpoints, and it communicates over an internal
channel with the BusinessWorks server to pass client requests.
Essentially, a servlet peeled off SOAP and policy information, then
passed the core message to the TIBCO engine for processing.
Collaborative Business Process Support in IHE XDS through ebXML Business Processes
Asuman Dogac, et al (eds), ICDE 2006 Presentation
Currently, clinical information is stored in all kinds of proprietary
formats through a multitude of medical information systems available
on the market. This results in a severe interoperability problem in
sharing electronic healthcare records. To address this problem, an
industry initiative, called 'Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE)'
has specified the 'Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS)' Profile
to store healthcare documents in an ebXML registry/repository to
facilitate their sharing. The authors describe the implementation of
an enhanced IHE architecture demonstrating how ebXML Business
Processes, IHE Workflow Profiles and the IHE XDS architecture can all
be integrated to provide collaborative business process support in
the healthcare domain... They show that by using the ebBP Binary and
Multiparty collaborations, it is possible to completely specify the
IHE workflow profiles. These collaborations include all the required
information such as exchange of documents (interactions), actors,
and other constraints or conditions in order to perform an enterprise-
wide workflow management. The ebBP specification document is then
used by each actor involved to have an agreement (CPA) and to create
its own logic and rules to specify intra-departmental workflows in
BPEL by composing Web services.
See also: Ontolog
Tools for Enterprise Mashups
Jon Udell, InfoWorld
The author says new Firefox add-ins are powerful tools for developing
composite Web applications. Mashups are lightweight and agile in two
important ways. They rely on services that live on the WS-Lite end of
the tolerance continuum, where recombination seems almost effortless.
And they rely on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) techniques to
make deployment of responsive and richly interactive interfaces seem
almost effortless. Mashups can do what Lotus Notes did for an earlier
generation: empower user-driven innovation at the level of individuals,
workgroups, and departments. The Web Developer Extension is a huge
compendium of useful ways to inspect, validate, and even modify the
elements and styles in a Web page. The feature I use most often is the
live CSS editor. As you rewrite style declarations, you see the effects
of your changes immediately. FireBug, which is itself a kind of mashup
of the JavaScript console and the DOM Inspector, adds more CSS goodness.
IE7 will make aggressive use of CSS more viable. The more effectively
we can create and maintain CSS-tagged content, the saner our enterprise
mashups will be. CSS will play an increasing role in the semantics, as
well as the style, of enterprise mashups. For several years now I've
been reaping the benefits of a content management strategy that enriches
Web pages with data-driven intelligence and interactivity. The strategy
involves microformats, structured blogging, and structured search. CSS
is the common enabler, and better CSS tools will be an accelerant.
See also: W3C CSS resources
Storing an XML Document in Apache Xindice
Deepak Vohra, O'Reilly OnJava.com
Apache Xindice is a native XML database in which XML documents may be
stored, queried, and modified. The advantage of a native database over a
relational database is that mapping of XML to SQL is not required.
Instead, XPath is used to query the Xindice database and XML:DB XUpdate
is used to update the database. Xindice implements the Java XML:DB API
to add, query, update XML documents to the Xindice database. XML
documents in the Xindice database are stored in collections; a
collection may consist of one or more XML documents. Xindice also
provides a command-line tool which has the same functionality as the
XML:DB API.
See also: XML and databases
Web Services Policy Framework (WS-Policy)
IBM, BEA Systems, Microsoft, SAP AG, Sonic Software, VeriSign
The Web Services Policy Framework specification and XML Schema was
updated on March 09, 2006. WS-Policy provides a general purpose model
and syntax to describe and communicate the policies of a Web service.
WS-Policy assertions express the capabilities and constraints of a
particular Web service. WS-PolicyAttachments defines several methods for
associating the WS-Policy expressions with Web services (i.e., WSDL).
The specification has been updated following the republication of
WS-Security Policy in July 2005, to reflect the constraints and
capabilities of Web services that are using WS-Security, WSTrust and
WS-SecureConversation. WS-ReliableMessaging Policy was also republished
in 2005 to express the capabilities and constraints of Web services
implementing WS-ReliableMessaging. The updated specifications include
the definition of nested assertions which allows for additional
granularity when expressing certain domain requirements, i.e., the
expression of different algorithm suites for a particular transport
binding. These specifications help Web services providers and consumers
discover the capabilities and constraints that they share to enable
interoperability of these services.
XMetaL Author 4.6 Service Pack 2 DITA Edition
Rohit Singla, SOA Web Services Journal
Open source DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) has become the
standard for producing technical documentation. Rather than producing a
document in a traditional fashion with chapters and pages, DITA
individually classifies all of the components in a document, thereby
allowing each element to be reusable, customizable, and easily adopted
throughout the rest of the document. Blast Radius has now taken the DITA
technical standard and applied it their already popular XMetaL Author.
While XMetaL Author DITA is essentially a DTD at its core, on the
surface it offers the simple functionality of a basic word processor,
thus allowing anyone from amateurs to advanced technical writers to have
the ability to create or edit complex documents in XML or SGML. Through
DITA the author also has the ability to set predefined DTD or XML Schema
rules to allow many users to contribute to a document while ensuring
consistency and validation throughout the document.
See also: DITA references
Handling Web Services Transactions
Daniel Rubio, SearchWebServices
Executing individual pieces of software to perform as one unit of work
is an area consistently tackled by many software platforms and an issue
that is central to many business processes. The all encompassing term
for this subject is named "transactions." In ththis article, Rubio
addresses some of the issues and approaches to working with transactions
in the context of Web services. Focus is on WS-Coordination, WS-Atomic
Transaction and WS-Business Activity. WS-Coordination defines the
underlying foundations for any transactional process taking place
between Web services. Used in conjunction with either WS-Atomic
Transaction or WS-Business Activity, WS-Coordination is used to define
the mechanism by which Web services register and coordinate themselves
to take part in a transaction.
** Note on references for "CCTS Key Model Concepts" 2006-03-08
XML.org Daily Newslink for Thursday, 09 March 2006 carried a reference
for "How to Solve the Business Standards Dilemma: CCTS Key Model
Concepts," by Gunther Stuhec (SAP Developer Network). Daily Newslink
editor received multiple reports about difficulty accessing the article
and/or its series companion, "The Context Driven Business Exchange,"
which was aliased to a shortened URI. Pending investigation of this
situation, possibly the fault of this newsletter editor, please
see:
http://xml.coverpages.org/SAP-BusinessStandardsDilemma-CCTS-20060309.html
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