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XML and Web Services In The News - 30 March 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML.org Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
WSDM for J2EE Provides Next-Generation Management
Leigh Williamson, et al., IBM developerWorks
This article explains how two management standards, WS-Distributed
Management and JSR 077, actually work together with the help of AIDE.
WSDM is the next generation of management. Using existing development
tooling, the process of enablement is quick and straightforward.
Modeling the management capabilities of existing resources can be more
involved than actually implementing the management service once modeled.
Using WSDM allows consolidated and service-oriented management using
existing APIs such as JSR-77, JMX, or CIM. The next generation of
Manager products will be able to leverage WSDM interfaces to dynamically
discover and introspect the capabilities of new resources that may not
have existed when the manager program was originally written. Because
of its inherent decoupling of management client from managed resource
(including implementation language), there is tremendous opportunity
to combine and correlate between systems employing wildly different
native management interfaces. The AIDE, the Autonomic Task Manager for
Administrators, and the WSDM Browser for CIM and OSGi tools at
alphaWorks have recently been updated.
See also: WSDM references
National Archives Readies Move to OpenDocument
Howard Dahdah, ComputerWorld
The Digital Preservation team at the National Archives is looking to
migrate its Xena preservation software to the new OpenDocument format
with the next release of the software, in turn being the first
Australian government agency to do so. The National Archives has been
involved in drafting the Open Document Format for Office Applications
(OpenDocument) format, working closely with the OASIS standards group
in submitting code for the new file format. OpenDocument is a
specification for standardizing documents based on an Extensible
Markup Language (XML) file format. It covers the features required by
text, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents... Michael Carden,
preservation software manager at the National Archives of Australia,
said NAA is in the process of migrating its office file preservation
format to use the OpenOffice 2.0 suite which by default uses
OpenDocument. Carden said his team at NAA was testing code at this
minute and has been submitting changes to the CVS repository on
Sourceforge regularly. The NAA is interested in ODF because the nature
of its work involves receiving information in disparate file types
from all over the country.
See also: ODF references
Creative Commons Releases Open Source Software ccHost
Jon Phillips, NewsForge
"ccHost, an Open Source project that provides web-based infrastructure
to support collaboration, sharing, and storage of multi-media using
Creative Commons licenses and metadata, has released version 2.0. The
new features most notably show up and are tested in Creative Commons'
project, ccMixter, a popular on- line music social network service that
supports legal media sharing and remixing. ccHost is the Open Source
Software engine powering ccMixter. Anyone may download, install, and
use ccHost to freely build media sharing communities. If you're into
sampling, remixing and mash-ups grab the sample packs and a cappellas
for download and you can upload your version back into ccMixter, for
others to enjoy and re-sample. For audio-based installations there is
support for M3U-based radio. While previous versions of ccHost had RSS
support, ccHost 2.0 now supports the ATOM feed standard and caching
for all feed types. On the administrative side, ccHost now ships with
the sample pool API turned on; this allows for multiple different
ccHost installations to query each other for samples. Beyond the basic
usage of multiple ccHost installations communicating through this
RESTful API, anyone may also use the simple sample pool API to write
code that interacts with a ccHost installation's sample pool. Other
administrative additions include import and export of settings,
internationalization accessible through a string editor, replacement
of magpie with custom code, a new ratings panel, stricter fairness
policies, and various administrative options for administrators to
customize ccHost.
See also: ccMixter web site
Image Annotation on the Semantic Web
Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Raphael Troncy, et al. (eds), W3C Working Draft
W3C has announced that its "Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment
Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft for "Image
Annotation on the Semantic Web." Produced by the group's Multimedia
Annotation in the Semantic Web Task Force. The need for annotating
digital image data is recognized in a wide variety of different
applications, covering both professional and personal usage of image
data. Most work done in this area does not [currently] use semantic-
based technologies partly because of the differences between the
multimedia and the web communities and their underlying standardization
organizations. This document explains the advantages of using Semantic
Web languages and technologies for image annotations and provides
guidelines for doing so. It is organized around a number of
representative use cases, and a description of Semantic Web
vocabularies and tools that could be used to help accomplish the task
mentioned in the uses cases.
See also: Semantic Web references
Microsoft And Eclipse: A Showdown for Ajax Leadership
Charles Babcock, InternetWeek
Microsoft and backers of Eclipse, the open source programmer's workbench,
have stepped up efforts to create Ajax-friendly tools for building
interactive Web applications. Unlike the mature technical standards for
server-side software, tools and technologies for Web development are
changing rapidly. Ajax is the symbol of emerging Web development,
combining JavaScript and XML so that, instead of requiring round trips
to a server each time a user wants new data, a browser's cache pre-
fetches the information that might appear next. This leads to much faster
interaction, with Google Maps among the star examples. Eclipse leaders
-- which include IBM, Intel, Red Hat, and SAP -- last week laid out the
expansion of the developer's workbench into a platform that can compete
with Microsoft in the enterprise. Microsoft last week released an
updated test version of its own Ajax development tool, called Atlas,
that creates standard JavaScript on an application's client side.
Microsoft also has written server-side extensions to JavaScript to
improve the way Ajax apps work on Windows computers, so software written
in Atlas can interact with elements of Windows Vista. But Microsoft
won't ship Atlas until it releases the next version of Visual Studio,
called Orcas, and that's still several years away. Meanwhile, Eclipse
is capitalizing now on the proliferation of Ajax toolkits. Microsoft
has the advantage of being able to tightly integrate its tools with
Windows, its SQL Server database, and other software. Indeed, IBM
donated Eclipse's core workbench technology as open source code because
it wants Java tools to have a level of integration similar to Microsoft's.
GROKLAW Wrong on "Microsoft Muscles in on OpenDocument Group"
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly 'Opinion'
"I have been involved in that world (ISO SC34 in particular) for more
than a decade now, and GROKLAW's concerns do not seem realistic to me.
For a start, standards are voted on by national bodies. So even if
Microsoft got membership on all the local committees of every country
that has a vote, they cannot stop ODF being standardized. You cannot
compare ISO with groups like W3C or OASIS where corporation
representatives get a direct vote on final issues. Cynics might say
that one reason for the anti-ISO message that periodically erupts from
some large companies stem from their lack of ability to influence ISO
standards as strongly as they can influence other standards bodies.
Now if the MIcrosoft representative or their cypher had the job of
counting the votes then there would be the possibility of fraudulent
miscounting or 'losing' ballots, I suppose. But the interest in these
standards and minimal diligence by national bodies in verifying that
their cast vote was counted easily addresses this. Back to reality...
I don't see how Microsoft can prevent ODF. And EXCMA fast-tracking is
no faster than OASIS fast-tracking in SC34. GROKLAW worries about
Microsoft using legitimate procedural tricks to slow ODF down [but]
I don't see much opportunity for endless delay here. ISO has a deadline
operating by which guarantees that stalled processes die, and a strong
committee chairman and sympathetic committee members at INCITS can
be expected to stare down silliness.
See also: the GROKLAW article
BEA Seeks to Modularize App Server
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
BEA Systems is working to modularize services from its WebLogic
Server application server, enabling them to run independently with
open source frameworks. Known as "backplane," the modularization
technology would make available separate from the application server
functions such as Web services, JMS (Java Message Service) support and
JDBC pooling, said Gary McBride, BEA senior product marketing manager.
Speaking at the BEA Dev2DevDays2006 technical event, McBride noted the
technology is in the conceptual stage. Also at the event, BEA
officials said the company within a few days would release a module
enabling the open source Apache Tomcat Web container to be
administered via BEA's own WebLogic Server 9.0 console framework. The
module, referred to as WebLogic Console for Tomcat Server, will provide
improved administration for Tomcat, [providing] better administrative
control over Tomcat than does the Tomcat administrative tool; users,
for example, will be able to manage multiple instances of Tomcat from
a single point and get information on factors such as aggregated
performance and logging.
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