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XML and Web Services In The News - 13 July 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP
HEADLINES:
BEA Announces WebLogic 9.2 With Emphasis on AJAX
Staff, AJAXWorld News Desk
BEA Systems has announced the general availability of WebLogic Portal
9.2, WebLogic Server 9.2 and BEA Workshop for WebLogic 9.2, further
extending WebLogic as the industry's leading Java Enterprise Edition
(JEE) application infrastructure platform to build, blend and deploy
service-enabled applications. The new WebLogic is being touted as
having emphasis on WSRP, and incorporates AJAX technology for the first
time. BEA WebLogic Portal 9.2 is a JEE-based enterprise portal server
that is designed to help simplify the production and management of
custom service-oriented portals. Among new tooling, federation and
community enhancements in WebLogic Portal 9.2 are new dynamic, adaptive
user interface capabilities with rich granular features such as
enhancements for AJAX support and market-leading support for Web
Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP). Combined, the upgraded portal is
designed to provide greater competitive advantage with increased
flexibility to help adapt to business changes and richer more
responsive user interfaces. Enhancements in WebLogic Portal 9.2 include
standards-based portlet federation, based upon the WSRP standard, with
support for syndication of portal books and pages, personalized
delivery, performance optimization and service lifecycle governance.
There is also a new community framework, as part of portal business
services, designed to simplify portal membership, management, and end
user production of community portals.
See also: the announcement
Using Open Source Software to Design, Develop, and Deploy a Collaborative Web Site, Part 1: Introduction and Overview
A. Lewis-Bowen, S. Evanchik, and L. Weitzman, IBM developerWorks
This article introduces the reader to an IBM Internet Technology
Group's series about the design, development, and deployment of a
collaborative Web site using open source software. The article gives
you an overview of the project, our requirements, and a comparison of
several content management systems analyzed. The authors also explain
their decision to use Drupal and how they could extend Drupal to meet
the objectives. The article reviews several platforms, noting the
advantages and disadvantages of Mambo, Typo3, Ruby on Rails, Movable
Type, WordPress, and TextPattern. Subsequent articles will describe a
flexible design methodology to address the process of designing
applications. This process may be used to design a user experience
for Web sites or applications. Then they jump into the technical
aspect of the development process with step-by-step guidelines you
can use to install the development tool suite and all the supporting
technologies. They will follow up with discussions of other aspects of
customizing the development environment and putting it to work,
including (1) Getting started with Drupal; (2) Drupal's interaction
with other software tools such as MySQL, PHP, CSS and Ajax; (3)
Building custom Drupal modules; (4) Deploying and tuning your
installation.
Google Web Toolkit
Bruce Perry, XML.com
If you are a Java software and Ajax developer, chances are the Google
Web Toolkit (GWT) has already grabbed your attention. Google released
this free toolkit, under an Apache-style license, in May 2006. The GWT
is designed for writing Ajax applications in the Java language. Google
has initially made available beta versions for Windows and Linux, with
a promise to add a Mac OS X version later on. This article describes
the development of a simple Ajax application on Mac OS X using GWT and
familiar Java tools, such as Apache Ant, the Tomcat 5.0 servlet
container, and the IntelliJ IDEA integrated development environment
(the latter is a commercial IDE). The article delves into some of the
typical web development related tasks GWT developers are likely to
confront while creating services for Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs).
RPCs are a part of a software model designed for the applications that
use service oriented architecture (SOA). These development tasks include:
(1) Automating the development and deployment steps with a build file
(the build runs the GWT compiler, then deploys the compiler's output
plus your server-side Java class files to a servlet container like
Tomcat, Jetty, or Resin). (2) Viewing the HTML generated by the GWT
application using Firefox's DOM Inspector. (3) Redesigning the widgets
on the page without access to the underlying HTML (since you are using
GWT's Java API). (4) Making sure the HTML is legal markup, for instance,
based on a particular XHTML document type required by your organization.
Banking on SOA
David L. Margulius, InfoWorld
At Wachovia Bank, Tony Bishop and his boss, CIO Susan Certoma, made a
huge bet on SOA. Now, they're on their way to completing the platform
for innovation the company needed. When you're the fourth largest
bank in the U.S., but only No. 14 in a fast-growing business that's
crucial to your future, how do you use technology to leapfrog the
competition? That was the question facing Susan Certoma, CIO of
Wachovia's $6 billion Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) division,
when she was recruited from a competing firm in 2004. While many
enterprises nibble at the edges of SOA, Wachovia's CIB division opted
for a ubiquitous services architecture to support the innovation and
efficiency it needed to catch competitors. To get the SOA ball rolling
quickly, Certoma recruited 265 technologists with expertise in SOA
and building financial services apps. At the heart of Wachovia CIB's
architecture is a multilayered, loosely coupled stack of services and
components. Business services and frameworks (such as those for sales,
trading, and order processing) occupy the top of the stack and can be
reused across the business units. These services are supported by
underlying infrastructure frameworks and plumbing services such as
logical data repositories that support federated queries, metadata
management, a prebuilt desktop framework, app servers plus grid and
fabric servers, along with in-memory data virtualization services and
a service bus.
DITA Specification Working Draft: DITA Version 1.1
Michael Priestley and JoAnn Hackos (eds), Draft Work in Progress
Members of the OASIS DITA TC have released an interim "work in
progress" draft for the DITA Architecture Specification version 1.1.
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) specification
defines both (a) a set of document types for authoring and organizing
topic-oriented information; and (b) a set of mechanisms for combining
and extending document types using a process called specialization.
The specification consists of: [1] The DTDs and schemas that define
DITA markup for the base DITA document types, as well as catalog files.
While the DTDs and schemas should define the same DITA elements, the
DTDs are normative if there is ever any discrepancy. [ii] The language
reference that provides explanations for each element in the base
DITA document types [iii] This document, which comes in three parts:
an introduction, which provides background concepts and an overview
of the architecture; the DITA markup specification, which provides
an overview of DITA's base document types; the DITA specialization
specification, which provides details of the mechanisms DITA provides
for defining and extending DITA document types. This document is part
of the technical specification for the DITA architecture. While the
specification does contain some introductory information, it is not
intended as an introduction to DITA nor as a users guide. The
intended audience of this specification consists of implementers of
the DITA standard, including tool developers and specializers.
See also: the DITA XML.org Focus Area
JSON on the Web, or: The Revenge of SML
Simon St. Laurent, XML.com
Back when XML seemed all new and shiny, suggestions that it might in
fact be too large, too complicated, or even slightly broken went over
rather badly. The xml-dev list rang with battles over whether further
simplifications were a good idea (since we'd just lost all that SGML
capability), and whether a "Simple Markup Language" (SML) could even
be useful. YAML now emerges from SML: The SML project faded into quiet
for a while, producing Common XML, a set of guidelines for using XML
conservatively, while a group of SML folks found common ground with
another effort, gave up on XML syntax, and produced YAML (YAML Ain't a
Markup Language). YAML files are pretty simple, using indentation
(spaces only!) to identify containment, and using dashes, colons,
brackets, and commas much like they are used in scripting languages.
The full specification, including 23 pages of introduction and tutorial,
is 85 pages long -- longer than the XML it sought to replace, but
incorporating much more information on processing and handling. They
even offer a quick reference card. Then comes JavaScript Object
Notation (JSON): JSON still supports more than the single structure SML
had offered--it has two basic data structures: name-value pairs, and
lists. It also offers a few data types, from strings to chars to
various types of numbers. They have a few examples to show how much
lighter it is than XML. It's too soon to tell if JSON will overtake
XML for the cases where it's most useful: data structures that don't
need a tremendous amount of type information. I'm guessing XML will
continue to be useful for documents, and that applications that want
huge amounts of enforced structure will stick with the more
sophisticated (and complicated) type structures offered by W3C XML
schemas. Still, it's good to see XML getting some heavy competition
after all of these years, and hopefully it'll reawaken some
innovative thinking on the XML side.
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