XML and Web Services In The News - Tuesday 09 April 2002

XML presses the publishing business
ComputerWeekly.com

Adobe Systems will join an army of software vendors that are using XML to transform the way documents are published and aimed at lowering publishing costs. The company will begin shipping Adobe FrameMaker Version 7.0, the latest release of its software for creating content once and publishing it to a variety of media, a process called multichannel publishing. From a single user interface similar to that of a word processor, Adobe FrameMaker enables users to create content, such as a user manual or sales documentation, and publish it for use in a variety of settings, including the Web, handheld devices and print. A new feature in the latest version is the ability to create content in XML.

Microsoft revamps spec for Web searches
Wylie Wong, News.com

Microsoft is revising a data access specification that will allow companies to more easily search databases on the Web. The software kingpin on Monday plans to announce a new version of XML for Analysis, a specification intended to offer better support for data mining and Web services applications. To help with the effort, Microsoft also is to announce that SAS Institute, which specializes in data mining technology, has joined the project.

Defining Web services in WSDL: A primer
Lamont Adams, Builder.com

In a Web services world, applications basically consist of remote, XML-driven components written in different languages connected via the Web using a standard remote-activation protocol. Service authors need some way to define the data format required to use the service they provide. Similarly, when you look to consume a service in an application model such as this, you need a way to ensure that your client uses the data format expected by the server. This is the niche Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) was meant to fill.

Creating a .NET Web service
Craig Utley, Builder.com

Web services are the next step in building distributed, modularized applications. They allow you to take some of your business logic, compartmentalize it in a component, and execute the functionality over the Internet. This article guides you through the creation of a simple .NET Web service. If you've been building COM components in the Microsoft world for the past several years, you're familiar with the concept of building a middle-tier layer of reusable objects that gives you a much greater degree of code reuse and flexibility. These components can be executed on the same machine as the client application or on separate machines using DCOM. Now, .NET takes this concept a step further, allowing you to place the components on remote machines to which you have only an HTTP connection; in other words, these remote machines may not be part of your corporate network. Thanks to the advent of the SOAP protocol, the binary standard of DCOM is replaced with a text-based, XML-based calling syntax that allows clients using any operating system to call Web services that are themselves running on any operating system.

Web Services and Financial Services
Demir Barlas, Line56

Wachovia Hooks up to Grand Central for rapid access to partner data sources. Wachovia Securities, the fourth largest financial holding company in the U.S., lives and dies on information. Take Wachovia's Equity Capital Markets division, which delivers research to investment banking clients. For Wachovia's analysts to be effective, they have to obtain rapid access to data sources, which constitute the foundation for much of Wachovia's research.

Group unveils open interactive TV standard
Reuters

A group of interactive television content providers on Monday unveiled a new set of open technology standards for making interactive TV programs they claim will play on any TV set-top box or Web-based system. The production standards, developed by interactive TV company GoldPocket Interactive, have the backing of about 90 percent of the companies in the nascent industry, GoldPocket said. Interactive TV is a system for two-way communications via television sets using remote controls, and many cable TV and satellite TV operators are now beginning to install the systems across the United States. Currently, content offerings are limited to program guides and some movies-on-demand, but down the road the systems promise things like e-mail and online shopping via television. The standards are based on a form of the Extensible Markup Language, or XML, which is widely compatible with the major interactive set-top boxes on the market today.

Government urges slow road to XML
Margaret Kane, CNET News.com

A new report is cautioning federal agencies to go slowly in adopting XML. The General Accounting Office found that, in the absence of any formal governmental policy or standard on XML, federal agencies might want to hold back before adopting the Web standard. But the GAO, Congress' investigative arm, did recommend that the government develop an overarching policy so agencies could take advantage of the new technology. XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a set of data definitions that has come into vogue because it promises to make information available across a number of computing systems that otherwise might not be compatible. A sort of a dictionary of dictionaries, it helps define various elements of a Web document and the relationships between them.

Microsoft brings developers deeper into its .NET
Matt Berger, CNN.com

An annual gathering this week for developers who build applications for Microsoft's Windows operating systems will provide the chance for a closer look at a set of recently launched development tools designed to further the company's wide reaching .NET initiative. Microsoft released its Visual Studio .NET developer software in February, branding the tools as the driver for a new breed of applications that can be delivered over the Internet as a service using standard technologies such as XML (Extensible Markup Language). Beginning Wednesday at the Microsoft Tech Ed 2002 developer conference in New Orleans, developers who have been using or testing the tools for enterprise development projects will have a chance to dig deeper into how to use them more effectively.

Adobe Enhances XML Authoring Support in FrameMaker Version 7.0
XML Cover Pages

Adobe has released FrameMaker Version 7.0 with enhanced collaboration and XML features. Version 7.0 now provides the ability to import, validate, and export XML files and DTDs for 'XML roundtripping'. It supports XML namespaces, import/export of UTF-8/UTF-16 Unicode files, and CSS style definition generation. Collaboration features include Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP), WebDAV, and workgroups.

ISO Common Logic Standard for Use With RDF, UML, DAML, & Topic Maps
XML Cover Pages

Participants at a Stanford University Common Logic Standardization Meeting have proposed an ISO Common Logic (CL) Standard related to Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) and Conceptual Graphs. Three concrete syntaxes are currently planned for the standard (KIF, CGIF, TPC+Unicode). The group discussed plans for an XML-based syntax [XML-CL] that could be mapped directly to the abstract syntax