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XML and Web Services In The News - 23 March 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML.org Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
OASIS Opens XML.org Focus Area for DITA Standard
Staff, OASIS Announcement
On March 22, 2006, the OASIS international standards consortium
introduced the DITA XML.org Focus Area web site serving as a community
"gathering place and information resource for the Darwin Information
Typing Architecture (DITA), an approved OASIS Standard that builds
content reuse into the authoring process. All DITA XML.org Focus Area
pages are accessible by the public, and users are encouraged to
contribute content. The site features three main sections: (1) DITA
Knowledge Base, which provides a technical and educational background
on the standard, as compiled by the site's Editorial Board; (2) DITA
Today, which serves as a community bulletin board and directory where
readers share news, events, product listings, services, case studies,
testimonials, and recommendations on other useful resources; (3) DITA
Wiki, which enables the public to dynamically collaborate on documents
and add new pages to the site."
See also: Cover Pages on DITA
Sun Unveils NetBeans Tools, Support For Java Developers
Staff, SYS-CON JDJ News Desk
Sun Microsystems hopes to take some of the shine off this week's
EclipseCon open source conference by unveiling new NetBeans tools and
support for Java developers. Sun director of developer marketing, Jean
Elliott, said the push comes as the company recognizes the "strategic
importance" of developer support. She claimed the Software Developer
Network (SDN), home to Sun's Java tools and projects, will reach two
million registered developers by the end of Sun's fiscal year in June --
up from just over one million last June. Currently, there are 1.75m
users, although it is unclear how many are repeat visitors to SDN;
Sun's decision to give away tools last year helped membership take off.
Sun hopes to continue this momentum with latest offerings for its open
source NetBeans IDE and framework. The company is releasing a C/C++
plugin for Windows, Linux and Solaris, an updated Java Web Services
Developer Pack previewing web services in the next Java SE and Java
Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and a free preview edition of
NetBeans Enterprise Pack 5.5 for Mac OS X.
See also: the WSDP announcement
Web Services Addressing Is a W3C Proposed Recommendation
Staff, W3C Announcement
W3C has announced the advancement of "Web Services Addressing - Core"
and its "SOAP Binding" to Proposed Recommendations. Web Services
Addressing provides transport-neutral mechanisms to address Web services
and messages. The "Web Services Addressing 1.0 - Core" document defines
a set of abstract properties and an XML Infoset representation thereof
to reference Web services and to facilitate end-to-end addressing of
endpoints in messages. This specification enables messaging systems to
support message transmission through networks that include processing
nodes such as endpoint managers, firewalls, and gateways in a transport-
neutral manner. A Web service endpoint is a (referenceable) entity,
processor, or resource to which Web service messages can be addressed.
Endpoint references convey the information needed to address a Web
service endpoint. A Web service endpoint may in fact have multiple such
descriptions. Similarly, multiple EPRs can be used to convey information
needed to address a particular Web service endpoint. An EPR is intended
to convey information required to address a Web service endpoint whereas
a WSDL 2.0 description is intended to describe a Web service. The "SOAP
Binding" specification defines the binding of the abstract properties
defined in Web Services Addressing 1.0 - Core to SOAP Messages. Comments
on the PRs are welcome through April 18, 2006.
See also: WS-Addressing references
Metered Web Services
Jon Udell, InfoWorld
S3, Amazon's new simple storage service, has launched. Amazon is
offering metered storage for blobs of data in quantities ranging from
1 byte to 5 GB. S3 provides a simple key/value store, like the ever-
popular Berkeley DB, but it operates purely as a service and at
Internet scale -- albeit without locking or transactional features.
Objects can be world-readable or governed by a range of access controls.
REST (Representational State Transfer) and SOAP APIs are provided,
along with wrappers in a variety of popular languages. Pricing is
aggressive for storage, somewhat less so for data transfer. Amazon's
commerce engine handles the billing. As of 2006-03-23: '$0.15 per
GB-Month of storage used, $0.20 per GB of data transferred.' The
ability to track usage will enable the future business model for
network services. An especially nice touch is the capability to hook
those objects directly into the BitTorrent network, in order to lower
the cost of distributing popular content. BitTorrent is an open source
Internet distribution protocol. S3's bandwidth rates are inexpensive,
but BitTorrent allows developers to further save on bandwidth costs for
a popular piece of data by letting users download from Amazon and other
users simultaneously. Any publicly available data in S3 can be
downloaded via the BitTorrent protocol, in addition to the default
client/server delivery mechanism. Another handy feature is time-limited
access. As a developer you can provide access to an object using a
signed URL that expires at a time of your choosing. Anyone can access
it until then. Afterward, it's gone.
See also: S3 web site
Observations on Distributed Authentication and Authorization in Web Applications
Eve Maler, Presentation at W3C Workshop
This paper was presented at the W3C Workshop on Usability and
Transparency of Web Authentication. "A number of modern-day
technologies, such as the LID, OpenID, and YADIS community efforts;
the SXIP protocols; Microsoft's Infocard technology; and SAML, Liberty,
and Shibboleth tackle various aspects of distributing user identity
information (identifiers, credentials, attributes, and entitlements)
across Internet domain boundaries. To varying degrees, they attempt
to tackle two complementary goals: allowing web applications and
services to use the identity information for personalization and access
control, and allowing users to shape their digital identity and control
the sharing of personal information with those same web applications
and services. At the same time, many of these solutions proceed from
different assumptions or embody special usage scenarios (for example,
making different choices around the relatively priorities of security,
ease of integration, privacy, and so on).
See also: SAML references
GM Turns to IT to Fix Parts Supply Chain
Patrick Thibodeau, ComputerWorld
General Motors Corp. is turning to automation to improve its auto parts
distribution system to dealers, ending practices that had made for a
bumpy ride for its auto parts supply chain. By the end of 2007, GM
expects to have its approximately 8,000 U.S. and Canadian dealers using
its Retail Inventory Management (RIM) system, which relies on
intelligence gleaned from nationwide parts sales to recommend parts-
restocking policies at dealerships. Since its nationwide launch of RIM
in August, about 1,000 GM dealers are active on the new system, and
another 3,500 are enrolled and will soon be active. According to Donna
Colorito, process information officer at GM Service and Parts Operations,
GM uses BEA Systems Inc.'s WebLogic Server to distribute parts
information from its legacy systems and has adopted Electronic Business
XML (ebXML) as its communications protocol. The RIM system also requires
interfaces built into the dealer management systems. A key aspect of
the system is recommending what part to stock, and that's not a trivial
thing. GM has some 1.3 million parts that can be ordered, and
dealerships typically have between 5,000 and 12,000 parts on the shelf
at any given time.
See also: ebXML web site
An SOA to Govern All?
Clint Boulton, InternetNews.com
IBM has unveiled Service Oriented Architecture Governance, a bouquet
of software, processes and services to help customers create policies
in their distributed computing systems. Distributed computing systems,
such as SOAs, allow communications such as Web services talk to one
another as they shuttle from network to network to execute business
transactions. These Web services need to be corralled, organized and
controlled by their users, or they may break down and become useless.
This control is important at a time when customers rely on the Web
services to meet service-level agreements and ensure availability. A
new plug-in for IBM Rational Method Composer allows certain governance
best practices from IBM's Business Consulting Services to be packaged
as a reusable asset and delivered as part of Rational Method Composer,
the Armonk, N.Y., company's process platform for IT lifecycle
management. Another SOA Governance bundle from IBM's software
development line, IBM Rational Data Architect, helps customers adopt
and enforce corporate and industry standards on SOAs. The product will
help customers comply with corporate governance policies. IBM's SOA
Governance comes as governance practices are increasingly moving out
from under the storage mantle, as governed by compliance regulations
such as HIPAA and SEC 17a-4, and into broader computing areas.
See also: IBM on SOA governance
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