XML and Web Services In The News - 06 September 2005

Securing Service-Oriented Applications
Anthony Nadalin, et al., IBM developerWorks
This article is Part 7 in the series 'SOA Programming Model for Implementing Web Services.' An SOA programming model must ensure that each service invocation adheres to security policies that are valid for both the requester and service endpoint. The security infrastructure -- including the ability to authenticate requesters and authorize their access to services, propagate security context across Web service requests based on an underlying trust model, audit significant events, and effectively protect data and content -- forms a fabric of the SOA environment that helps secure components and services. At the core of all SOA security is a policy-based infrastructure and management of the policies. In the ideal case, the SOA application is centered on business logic, delegating the enforcement of security policies, and handling trust relationships for the infrastructure. The Web services security model and approaches based on the Web services security specifications help meet the challenges of securing service-oriented applications.
See also: WS-Security references

FSF Looking to Raise $500,000 for GPL 3 Evangelizing
China Martens, InfoWorld
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the receipt of its first funding to help spread the word about the next version of the GPL (general public license), GPL 3, Tuesday, according to Peter Brown, executive director of the organization. With GPL 3 likely to appear in early 2007, FSF work to highlight the new license will occur under the newly created GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project. The GPL is the most popular license for free software and was created by Richard Stallman in 1989 for the GNU free software operating system project. Version 2 of the GPL appeared in 1991. The license gives users the right to freely study, copy, modify, reuse, share and redistribute software. Internationalizing the GPL is one of the main tasks at hand when drafting GPL 3; resolving incompatibilities with other licenses is also a key area for GPL 3 to address. The license also needs to reflect changes in technology, most notably the emergence of Web services, when what's being redistributed is not a copy of the software itself, but a service based on that software. FSF Europe President Georg Greve [noted] the possible inclusion of a patent retaliation clause in GPL 3. The idea would be that someone who patents software would forfeit the right to use free software, notably those companies that employ digital rights management (DRM) applications.
See also: CNET News.com

XHTML Microformats for the Atom Publishing Protocol
Robert Sayre, (Individual) Internet Draft
Atom Publishing Protocol client implementations require a fair amount of ancillary server-provided data in order to provide a smooth user experience. Rather than invent a plethora of new XML formats, this specification chooses to present a number of XHTML profiles, colloquially known as 'microformats'. hCat is an XHTML profile for encoding the three standard attributes of Atom category elements. By providing a definition list containing encoded category information, servers can present clients with a list of known categories in an XHTML definition list. hCat also allows description of endpoints for category editing through a simple HTTP-based protocol. HTTP provides response codes which indicate the success or failure of a given request, but does not go into great detail on textual diagnostics for the end-user. hError is an XHTML profile that encodes error information intended for the end-user.
See also: Atom Internet-Drafts

OpenOffice.org Releases Second Beta Version of its 2.0 Suite
Gene J. Koprowski and Sean Gallagher, eWEEK
After a review of about 600 software bugs, the second beta version of OpenOffice.org 2.0, featuring the OASIS-approved XML file format, has been released for testing. A new version of OpenOffice.org 2.0 is being released for beta in advance testing this week, the second beta release of the free software available for computer users. OpenOffice.org is an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. Based on code donated by Sun Microsystems when it acquired Star Division in 1999, the OpenOffice.org suite is developed and supported by a community of volunteers with Sun sponsorship. OpenOffice.org is available as a free download for Windows, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and Sun's Solaris platform. Versions for additional operating systems and computing platforms are in the works. The suite features a number of improvements over the first release of OpenOffice.org, including a new database module that makes the database features of the suite more accessible. It also introduces support for the OASIS OpenDocument XML file format, as well as a new user interface and document filters that the OpenOffice.org team claims make the application even more interoperable with other office suites, as well as easier to use and learn, regardless of the operating system it is run on.
See also: On licensing