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XML and Web Services In The News - 26 May 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML.org Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP
HEADLINES:
oBIX Unbound
Aaron Hansen, AutomatedBuildings.com
The Open Building Information Exchange (oBIX) Web services specification
is feature complete and if not in public review already, will soon be.
In a nutshell, oBIX will allow integrators to connect control systems,
such as access control, with enterprise systems, such as human resources.
While today's requirements say this will be done using points, historical
trends and alarms, everyone expects these requirements to evolve rapidly.
Therefore oBIX is much more than just a way to describe points,
historical trends and alarms. It is an extensible model that describes
other models -- a meta-model. oBIX allows control vendors to fully
describe their proprietary systems and allow enterprises to discover
non-standard data and invent new applications for it. Extensibility is
woven into the very fabric of oBIX using something called the contract.
A contract is a list of all the patterns a complex piece of data conforms
to. Contracts are used to describe standardized structures such as points,
historical trends and alarms; and they are also used to describe
proprietary vendor data. The beauty of the contract is that new ones can
be introduced without changing the oBIX schema. oBIX is unique in another
regard -- it is binding agnostic. Not only is there a SOAP binding so
oBIX can interoperate with WS-* (the Web services stack), there is an
HTTP binding making oBIX a RESTful standard. REST, or Representational
State Transfer, is the architectural style of the World Wide Web. While
not a standard itself, it is best described as the set of standards that
make the web successful. HTTP, URL, XML and HTML are some of those
standards. oBIX is built upon these standards; it identifies objects
with URLs, represents object state with XML, and transfers objects using
HTTP; oBIX servers can be accessed with a web browser and therefore can
be indexed by search engines, linked to by other web pages and basically
interoperate with any other mainstream web technology. Because oBIX is
such a flexible modeling language, it has other uses beyond real-time
integration.
See also: the OASIS oBIX TC
Liberty Eyes Consumers with Web Services Project
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
The Liberty Alliance plans to give its Web services framework a
consumer-oriented bent, enabling federated social networking. A version
of the new framework is set to be released for public review within a
couple of weeks. It will be followed by a review period before a final
version is set this fall. With the upgraded framework, users will be
able to share items such as music lists, photos and calendars, with
privacy and security issues addressed by the framework, said Brett
McDowell director of the Liberty Alliance. "We're solving the identity
theft problem with this from an online perspective," McDowell said.
There will be no way, for example, for phishing of identities. The
Liberty Alliance focuses on developing a standard for federated network
identity supporting current and emerging network devices. The alliance
this week announced the launch of its Global Web Services Deployment
Program, featuring a kick-off event in San Francisco on June 12. The
program features workshops focused on identity-enabled Web services.
Liberty believes that federation is needed for identity-enabled Web
services to advance. The June 12 [2006] event will feature alliance
members from Intel, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Neustar.
See also: the announcement
Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0: RDF Mapping
Jacek Kopecky and Bijan Parsia (eds), W3C Working Draft
W3C has announced the release of a Last Call Working Draft for "Web
Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0: RDF Mapping,
produced by the Web Services Description Working Group, as part of
the W3C Web Services Activity. Web Services Description Language
(WSDL) provides a model and an XML format for describing Web services.
This document describes a representation of that model in the
Resource Description Language (RDF) and in the Web Ontology Language
(OWL), and a mapping procedure for transforming particular WSDL
descriptions into their RDF form. It aims to improve user experience
by describing how to produce Web content and Web sites intended for
delivery to mobile and small-screen devices.
See also: the news item
IBM Workplace Forms and XFDL
John Boyer, IBM Blog
Today is an exciting day for the IBM Victoria Software Lab because
today we have been pushing the new version of the IBM Workplace Forms
product line into the IBM release queue. The IBM Workplace Forms product
line is designed to simplify the process of creating and maintaining
forms-based web applications. The flagship knowledge product of the
product line is an XML vocabulary called XFDL, which is an XForms-
enabled language that provides a rich and precise presentation layer for
XML data. The IBM Workplace Forms software supports the full life cycle
of XFDL documents, from creation to run-time to processing of completed
form documents. The IBM Workplace Forms Designer is an eclipse-based
visual development environment for creating XFDL documents. It has a
main canvas for drag-and-drop design of the user interface. The
drag-and-drop palette has all the usual suspects for atomic form
controls as well as containment controls like repeat tables and
group/switch panes. The user can also add custom groups of controls to
the palette as single new controls. This makes it easy to standardize
constructs like toolbars or address blocks across all forms in a
workspace. The product line offers two alternatives for deploying XFDL
functionality to the client-side: the IBM Workplace Forms Viewer and
the IBM Workplace Forms Server -- WebForm Server. The viewer provides
the full implementation of the XFDL language, including rich user
experience, precision presentation layout, spell-checking, email client
integration, accessibility, rich text support, custom viewer extension
modules, offline fill experience, and digital signature security. While
some XFDL features such as digital signature generation and offline
fill require a viewer, the WebForm Server provides a significant portion
of the viewer functionality to web-browser-only client machines. The
user interacts with the HTML, and the tag-value pairs of data are merged
back into the XFDL document for processing by the back end of a web
application-- just as if the viewer had been used. Both of our form
run-time products are based on a common API that understands and
implements much of XFDL. Although the nature of XFDL as an XML vocabulary
means that standard XML tools could be used to process XFDL documents,
the XFDL API is also made available to the web application developer.
See also: XML and Forms
Microsoft: Use MS Word in Safe Mode
Ryan Naraine, eWEEK
Use Microsoft Word in safe mode to protect against targeted zero-day
attacks. That's the advice from Microsoft's security response team to
counter known attacks against a serious code execution vulnerability
in the widely used word processing program. In a pre-patch security
advisory, Microsoft said the flaw can be exploited when a user opens a
specially crafted Word file using a malformed object pointer. This
corrupts system memory in such a way that an attacker could execute
arbitrary code. The flaw can be exploited via the Web or via e-mail
but, in both scenarios, an attacker would have to trick a user into
opening the rigged Word file. Because the current attack vector requires
that the target is running the admin rights, the implementation of
software restriction policies can reduce the effects the attack.
Microsoft's advisory also contains step-by-step instructions for
running the vulnerable Word 2002 and Word 2003 in safe mode. The
company is recommending that users first disable the Outlook feature
to use Word as the default mail editor before changing settings to run
Word in safe mode.
See also: the advisory note
U.S. PTO Smashes JPEG Patent
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Linux Watch
Another attempt to tie down a standard with a patent has gone down in
flames. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected a patent that
Forgent Networks was asserting against the Joint Photographic Experts
Group, better known as JPEG, images standard. In the reexamination
proceeding initiated late last year by the PUBPAT (Public Patent
Foundation), The PTO Office Action released yesterday a finding that
the prior art submitted by PUBPAT completely anticipated the broadest
claims of the patent, U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672 (the '672 Patent).
"The Patent Office has agreed with our conclusion that it would have
never granted Forgent Networks' '672 patent had it been aware of the
prior art that we uncovered and submitted to them," said Dan Ravicher,
PUBPAT's Executive Director. In a press release, [Forgent Networks]
declares that the action upholds 27 of the 46 claims of Forgent's patent.
Forgent will vigorously defend the remaining claims that were not
initially upheld in this first office action. Forgent is currently
suing approximately 30 companies about the '672 patent. These include
camera companies like Afga, Canon, and Concord Cameras; PC vendors such
as Dell and HP; and software ISVs ranging from Microsoft to Sun. While
Forgent is also a scheduling software company, its revenue increasingly
depends on its aggressive pursuit of its IP (intellectual property)
holdings. In the three years since it began this course, Forgent's IP
program has generated more than $105 million in revenues primarily from
licensing the '672 Patent.
See also: patents and open standards
Image File Formats; Will WMP Be the Last Word?
Jon Erickson, DDJ
Few issues have been so consistently quarrelsome over the years as
schemes used to compress images and their associated file formats. GIF,
the "Graphics Interchange Format," is the first that springs to mind.
Introduced by CompuServe in the late 1980s, GIF is based on LZW data
compression, a technique patented by Unisys -- a fact that only came to
light after GIF was in widespread use. Royalties were claimed and lawsuit
threatened. It was a mess that really only went away when Unisys the
patent expired in 2003. Then in 2004, Forgent Networks threatened to sue
a bunch of hardware and software vendors, including the likes of Dell
and Apple, for allegedly infringing on its claim to a algorithm in the
JPEG, the "Joint Photographic Experts Group" file format. Then PNG came
along, a dollar short and a day late as it turned out. A public domain
alternative, PNG ("Portable Network Graphic) avoided most of the
acrimonious legal wrangling of GIF and JPEG, but was introduced too near
the end of the LZW patent lifecycle to gain much traction. Over the
years, other compressed image file formats came aboard, including the
likes of JPEG 2000, Apple's PICT, TIF and PSD from Adobe, SVG, the
"Scalable Vector Graphics" from the W3C, and Microsoft's BMP, to mention
a few. You'd think that with all these alternatives, we have all the
compressed image files we need. Think again. Microsoft has jump into
the deep end of the file format pool again, this time with its Windows
Media Photo Specification. To be built into Windows Vista, WMP is a
file format for continuous-tone still images that supposedly delivers
25:1 compression ratios for most uses of digital photography .The one
thing for sure is that, while it likely will make a splash, WMP won't
be the last word in compressed image file formats.
See also: W3C SVG resources
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