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XML and Web Services In The News - 16 August 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
CPPA: Enable Real-World Trading Partner Collaborations in SOA
Leo Fernandez, Ash Parikh, Varun Gupta;, Java World
This article is part of a series of short articles that introduce
readers to the industry's various Web services standards. These articles
provide a quick introduction to these standards, their backgrounds,
underlying architectures, benefits, status, and industry adoption. This
article focuses on Web services-enabled trading-partner collaboration
standards that influence a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The
article also showcases the advantage of using a flexible and high-
performance native XML database management system along with XQuery to
enable rapid and evolving loosely-coupled collaborations among trading
partners within and across enterprises. The ebXML Collaboration Protocol
Profile and Agreement (CPPA) standard plays a key role in an ebXML
registry by providing a mechanism for specifying the details of how
to support B2B integrations. It includes the details for transport,
messaging, and security constraints and also specifies the bindings to
a business-process specification document, which defines the business
interactions between two partners. This bottom-up approach of including
the business stakeholder in an integration right from the start enables
any business entity to build a scalable and flexible system, ensuring
information exchange occurs seamlessly.
See also: Solr Apache Incubator Project
Liberty Alliance Launches Global eGovernment Group
Staff, Liberty Alliance
Liberty Alliance, the global identity consortium working to build a
more trusted Internet, today announced the launch of a new group formed
to help governments speed the deployment of open standards and deliver
more privacy-respecting and secure identity-based services to citizens
worldwide. The Liberty Alliance eGovernment Group is open to all
organizations interested in identifying and addressing common business,
technical and policy challenges facing the public sector. Liberty's
eGovernment Group is chaired by Colin Wallis of the New Zealand
Government's State Services Commission, and includes representation
from government organizations from Denmark, Finland, France, Korea,
New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as global
and regional technology vendors and enterprises working in the government
sector, such as ActivIdentity, The Boeing Company, Gemalto, NEC,
Neustar, NTT and Sun Microsystems. This diverse mix of thought leaders
deploying public sector identity management solutions will help ensure
that the output of Liberty's eGovernment group meets the real-world
identity needs of governments, enterprises and citizens around the
globe.
See also: Liberty Alliance references
Enforcement the XML Way
Joab Jackson, Government Computer News
Policy management is one thing, but enforcing policy is another issue
altogether. You may have policies in place describing which personnel
can access which applications, or even which parts of a building. But
how do you enforce those privileges without overwhelming employees with
a plethora of passwords, or overloading administrators with an orgy of
authentication systems? At a recent Federal CIO Council XML Community
of Practice meeting, Anne Anderson, a senior staff engineer for Sun
Microsystems Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., introduced Access Control
Markup Language, or XACML (pronounced ex-ax-i-mal). Although still in
its commercial infancy, Extensible Markup Language-based XACML promises
a way of enforcing policies across different platforms. It doesn't care
what type of resources you're trying to control: "it might be a locked
door or a database," Anderson said. XACML has two major components,
a Policy Enforcement Point and Policy Decision Point. The PEP
intercepts requests for documents or services and sends a request to
the PDP, which consults a set of rules to determine if the requester
has the right to access the item. Rules can be made up of a combination
of conditions — XACML has a wide range of regular expressions,
comparisons and functions, and it can be extended to include other
capabilities.
See also: Anderson's XACML References
JBoss Making SOA Play With BPEL, ESB
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Raising its profile in the SOA space, JBoss is readying upgrades to
its jBPM (Java Business Process Management) software to support the
1.1 and 2.0 versions of BPEL (Business Process Execution Language).
The open source software vendor also released a beta version of its
ESB (enterprise service) bus this week. JBPM is a platform for workflow,
business process management, and process orchestration. BPM is critical
to SOA because SOA is all about integrating business processes and
publishing services, said Pierre Fricke, JBoss director of product
management. Also supporting jPDL (Java Process Definition Language),
jBPM has become a popular item, according to Fricke. "JBPM download
rates have tripled in the past year. We're now north of 20,000
downloads per month," Fricke said. "Up until jBPM was available, the
Java programmer that wanted to do workflow, that wanted to do BPM-type
of work within a Java program, had to buy very expensive packages,"
he said. BPEL 1.1 will be added to jBPM in September, with BPEL 2.0
due sometime afterward. The 2.0 version is expected to become the
OASIS-approved version of the specification.
Yahoo Delivers Resource for Python Developers
Eliot Kimber, Dr. Macro Blog
This article is one in series of highly informative discussions on
technologies related to XML Content Management. Kimber writes: What do
we mean by "linking" in the context of XML document processing? The
most general definition is "a semantic object that establishes a set of
one or more relationships among uniquely-addressible XML components".
This definition is reflected by the XLink and HyTime standards, which
provide syntax and semantics for establishing arbitrarily-complex
relationships between arbirarily-addressible things. XLink is limited
to the domain of linking among XML components, HyTime provides generic
facilities for making anything generically addressable and therefore
enables linking anything to anything via a single standard representation
mechanism (groves). A link is a semantic relationship whose meaning is
independent of how the relationship is established. It doesn't matter
how a link is expressed syntactically in your data: XLink, XIinclude,
HyTime, HTML, your own 20-year-old link markup... addressing, on which
semantic linking depends, is entirely syntactic. Addressing is the
plumbing or mechanics that let you physically connect things together:
the pointers. The addressing syntax you use has many practical
implications, including the availability of implementations, the cost
of implementation and processing, the opportunities for interoperation,
and so on, but the specific syntax you use doesn't affect the meaning
of the relationships established by the links that do the addressing.
Clear thinking about linking requires that you be able to make a
complete and clear distinction between the syntax-independent and
syntax-specific parts of linking.
Multi-Stage XSLT Scripts
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Articles
DB2 9's "pureXML" technology is speeding development for early customers,
One of the old secrets of text processing used to be using multiple
stages: a pipeline so that each stage did something clear and
comprehensible. The programming language OmniMark actually built this
notion in, first by having a three stage processor (text, SGML, ESIS)
then by generalizing these into processes; in OmniMark they were all
implemented as efficent co-routines or semi-co-routines. But I only
figured out how to do this in XSLT recently, multiple stages in a
single script — not to be confused with multiple passes of the same
data, which modes handle, nor with functions. You can store a tree of
elements made from parsing the input data in a variable, then use
another set of templates to process that, perhaps into another variable.
It is not as flexible as OmnIMark still — no validation=no enforced
unit test; no processing of unmarked-up text into marked-up text. A
typical strategy when converting from XML into some structured text
format is to have three transformations: (1) first, convert the XML
into ideal XML: resolve links as needed, remove extraneous elements
and attributes, convert cases, generate headings and other things that
need to be generated; (2) second, convert that ideal XML into an
XML-ized version of the output format; (3) third, convert the output
XML into the text format, delimiting and indenting as needed.
XML for Business Reporting Gains Momentum
Jon Udell, InfoWorld
"Slowly but surely, XBRL is winning converts among accountants,
governments. Two years ago I wrote an unflattering report on XBRL
(Extensible Business Reporting Language), an emerging standard that
aims to improve the speed, accuracy, and transparency of business and
financial reporting. I applauded its goals, as we all should in the
wake of Enron and other scandals, but worried about the complexity of
the 151-page XBRL specification, its aggressive use of esoteric features
of XML, and its reliance on accounting 'taxonomies' defined by
committees. XBRL aims to capture not only the vocabulary and syntax
of business reports but also the semantics encoded by standards such
as GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and IFRS
(International Financial Reporting Standards). Plans that require groups
to agree on taxonomies tend not to succeed. But thanks to regulatory
pressure and the will of cooperating entities to prevail, this might
prove to be a welcome exception to the rule. Charlie Hoffman's vision
encompasses more than just frictionless exchange of data. To the extent
that domain knowledge can be represented in XBRL, every accountant who
uses XBRL software has access to world-class expertise. That's a dream
worth pursuing. Hoffman and others don't dispute XBRL's reputation as
a complex beast, and they hope to tame it with better tools and
education. There's a huge opportunity for an open source XBRL engine,
so vendors can focus more on authoring, analysis, and reporting
applications. On the education front, we agreed that more emphasis on
modular and incremental adoption of XBRL would be helpful."
Adobe Flex Finds Its Footing
Jim Rapoza, August 16, 2006
There have been lots of changes in the first two years of Adobe's
promising rich Internet platform, and that's meant choppy waters for
developers. But eWEEK Labs finds that Version 2 adds the stability and
maturity needed to make Flex a major platform for creating Web apps and
services. eWEEK Labs' review of the bare-boned and limited Flex 1.0
release showed that the application probably should have been a beta.
The 1.5 release added stability to the platform, but it had all of
the growing pains more typical of a 1.0 release. Despite these
shortcomings, Flex has been attractive to developers, who appreciate
its simple coding structures and data handling, its strong presentation
layer and, most importantly, its tight association with the ubiquitous
Flash format. With the July release of Version 2, Flex looks like it
may be finally gaining the maturity and stability it needs to become
a major platform for creating powerful Web-enabled applications. In
the design view, we could drag and drop components to our application
layout and quickly build the basic presentation for an application. In
the coding view, all of the expected code assistants were available to
help in directly editing application code, style sheet information and
Flex-specific code, such as ActionScripts and Macromedia XML. Probably
the biggest weakness of Flex Builder, which is priced at $499, is the
fact that it runs only on Windows, which is rare among Adobe
applications and especially surprising considering that Eclipse itself
is cross-platform.
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