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XML and Web Services In The News - 30 June 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by IBM
HEADLINES:
Ex ante Disclosure: Risks, Rewards, Process and Alternatives
Andrew Updegrove, Consortium Standards Bulletin
The current hot topic at the IEEE, ETSI, and a number of other SSOs is
whether to permit disclosure of specific licensing terms -- including
cost -- before final adoption of a standard, with many opposed as well
as in favor of such a change. In fact, the Chairman of the U.S.
Department of Justice has encouraged prudent adoption of just such
"ex ante" disclosures. It's time for SSOs to "just say yes" to ex ante,
and to dedicate resources to perfecting this new and useful technique.
Ex ante disclosure of licensing terms, including cost, is being actively
discussed today in a variety of standard setting organizations (SSOs),
with strong opinions on both sides of the issue being offered in what
at times has been a heated debate. In this article, I attempt to place
this debate in context by describing ex ante alternatives, the antitrust
issues involved and the alternative mechanisms that can be employed
instead to achieve similar results. I also suggest that ex ante
disclosure presents no greater an antitrust challenge than has often
been successfully addressed in the past in the course of implementing
other changes to SSO intellectual property rights policies and
procedures. I conclude by proposing that the standard setting community
should embrace, perfect, and when appropriate, add prudently designed
process steps to enable ex ante disclosure of relevant patent claims in
order to increase the likelihood of issuing commercially viable, as well
as technically useful, standards.
See also: Patents and Open Standards
Delve Inside the Lucene Indexing Mechanism
Deng Peng Zhou, IBM developerWorks
This article introduces the indexing mechanism of Lucene, a popular
full-text IR library written in the Java language. A number of large,
well-known organizations are using Lucene. For example, Lucene
provides searching capabilities for the Eclipse help system, MIT's
OpenCourseWare, and so on. In this article the author demonstrates
how to index your documents with Lucene, discusses how to improve the
indexing performance, and analyzes Lucene's index file structure.
Lucene is an open source project in the popular Apache Jakarta Project
family. Keep in mind that Lucene is not a ready-to-use application,
but rather an IR Library that lets you add searching and indexing
functionality to your application.
See also: the Apache Lucene project
Mobile Web Services: A New Agent-Based Framework
Mustafa Adacal and Ayse B. Bener, IEEE Internet Computing
The overhead involved in XML processing presents a huge problem for
mobile Web services applications. Many researchers have experimented
with performance improvements such as faster parsers, data compression,
protocol optimizations, or binary encodings, but the outcome generally
depends on the structure of the data used and the application itself.
Another important issue that influences performance is the choice of
architecture -- a wireless portal network architecture, for example,
avoids XML processing on mobile devices, whereas a wireless extended
Internet architecture requires XML processing as well as the ability
to transfer SOAP messages. Moreover, in a wireless extended Internet
architecture, new or updated applications must be downloaded over
wireless networks before the user can use them. This process is time-
consuming and costly because of the additional data that must be
transferred over limited bandwidth. The authors describe an agent-based
mobile services framework which uses wireless portal networks and
eliminates XML processing on mobile clients. It also offers dynamic
service selection and rapid application development and deployment
for Web service providers.
See also: W3C Mobile Web Initiative
The Screening Room #6: XML for Analysis
Jon Udell, InfoWorld
In the June episode of 'The Screening Room' I received an education
from Chris Harrington, who runs the Active Interface consultancy, about
an emerging standard for online analytical processing (OLAP) called
XML for Analysis (XMLA). Although XMLA was originally a
Microsoft/Hyperion initiative, it's attracting wider interest and
seems headed toward standardization. At the conclusion of the
screencast, Chris points to this proof-of-concept interoperation
between his client and Mondrian, an open-source Java-based OLAP server
that can turn a number of SQL databases, including MySQL, into XMLA
providers. In a recent podcast interview Kingsley Idehen announced
that in addition to releasing an open source version of the Virtuoso
database, there would also be an Open AJAX Toolkit whose data-binding
capabilities are abstracted in terms of XMLA, an interface provided
by Virtuoso and by SQL Server. How will business intelligence meet
Web 2.0? Chris Harrington and Kingsley Idehen think AJAX and XMLA will
form the bridge.
See also: earlier references
Domain-Independent, Composable Web Services Policy Assertionst
Anne H. Anderson, IEEE Conference Paper
This paper was presented at the Seventh IEEE International Workshop
on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks (POLICY 2006). Paper
abstract: "The current model for the predicates, or 'Assertions',
used in a WS-Policy instance is for each policy domain to design new
schema elements for that domain's Assertions. Their semantics are
defined in an associated specification and are domain-specific. This
model leads to interoperability and maintenance problems and hinders
dynamic service composition. WS-PolicyConstraints is a domain-
independent language for writing Assertions that is based on the Web
Services Policy Language subset of XACML; it differs in addressing
only the Assertion layer. This paper describes problems with
domain-specific Assertions, the WS-PolicyConstraints alternative,
and problems encountered in the development of this language."
[Note: the XACML References document Version 1.65 provides information
on Bibliography, Related Standards, Products and Deployments, and the
XACML Attribute Definitions. The editor reports that the XACML
References resource cites over 160 technical articles and lists some
44 XACML deployments.]
See also: XACML References
Last Call Working Draft for WebCGM 2.0
Benoit Bezaire, David Cruikshank, Lofton Henderson; W3C Working Draft
W3C has announced the publication of a Last Call Working Draft
specification for "WebCGM 2.0." Computer Graphics Metafile, or CGM, is
an ISO standard for tree-structured, binary graphics format that has
been adopted especially by the technical industries (defense, aviation,
transportation, etc) for technical illustration in electronic documents.
The W3C Working group was chartered to develop a W3C Recommendation
for WebCGM 2.0, starting with WebCGM 2.0 Submission. WebCGM -- first
published (1.0) in 1999 followed by a second (errata) release in 2001
-- unifies potentially diverse approaches to CGM utilization in Web
document applications, and therefore represents a significant
interoperability agreement amongst major users and implementers of the
ISO CGM standard. WebCGM finds significant application especially in
technical illustration, electronic documentation, and geophysical data
visualization, amongst other application areas. WebCGM 2.0 adds a DOM
(API) specification for programmatic access to WebCGM objects, and a
specification of an XML Companion File (XCF) architecture, for
externalization of non-graphical metadata. WebCGM 2.0, in addition,
builds upon and extends the graphical and intelligent content of WebCGM
1.0, delivering functionality that was forecast for WebCGM 1.0, but
was postponed in order to get the standard and its implementations
to users expeditiously.
See also: WebCGM Working Group
Web Apps Get New Open-Source App Server
Charles Babcock, InformationWeek
A new open source application server is available for download from
WSO2 Inc., a little known but highly regarded Sri Lankan firm of open
source developers. It's Tungsten 1.0 application server is designed
to handle Ajax and other scripting based applications more efficiently.
The WSO2 stands for Web Services Oxygenation, perhaps an alchemist's
way of saying it's time to activate a new generation of Web applications.
Nevertheless, WSO2 is bringing a fresh set of concepts and standards
to the notion of an application server, software that gives a Web site
its ability to scale across many users. Application servers available
today, such as IBM WebSphere, BEA Systems WebLogic, and Red Hat's JBoss,
are written in Java and geared to run Java applications. WSO2's Tungsten
1.0 comes in both Java and C versions, with the latter offering some
advantages when it comes to dealing with Web technologies. Many
applications today are being written in the popular PHP scripting
language, which itself is based on C, points out Sanjiva Weerawarana,
a former IBM Web services developer who is CEO of WSO2. Tungsten is
meant to process incoming XML messages and connect them to back-end SAP
or other applications. "We take the XML payload and context and pass it
to the application directly" without intermediate parsers or processing.
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