XML and Web Services In The News - 10 September 2003

James Clark Unveils a New XML Mode for GNU Emacs
Michael Smith, XMLHack
James Clark has announced the alpha release of nXML, a new mode for editing XML documents from within GNU Emacs. It's a milestone in that it's the first open-source editing application to enable context- sensitive validated editing against Relax NG schemas. It also provides a clever mechanism for real-time, automatic visual identification of validity errors, along with flexible syntax-highlighting and indenting capabilities. The real-time validation feature is similar to a feature in the Topologi Collaborative Markup Editor, a relatively new commercial application that takes a number of novel approaches to XML editing. The Emacs/nXML implementation works like this: As you are editing a document, nXML does background re-parsing and re-validating of the document in the idle periods between the times when you are actually typing in content. It visually highlights all instances of invalidity it finds in the document. If you then mouse over one of the invalidity-highlighted points in the document, popup text appears describing the validity error.
See also: Relax NG

Cognos Launches Web-Based BI System. NetReport Includes Customized Query and Reporting.
Stacy Cowley
Analytics and planning software vendor Cognos Inc. released Tuesday its new ReportNet system, a product company officials hope to position as a flagship offering. ReportNet is a Web-based query and reporting system intended to offer advanced customization options while reducing the burden and costs for administrators, by taking advantage of the features enabled by Web services standards such as XML and SOAP. The software includes multilingual support for languages, including French, German and Japanese, and can import data from other applications and BI (business intelligence) systems. That data exchange flows both ways: Cognos' API is open and extensively documented, and Cognos is encouraging partners and customers to tweak and extend the software.

SAP Previews .NET, Java Tools for Web Services
Vance McCarthy, Enterprise Developer News
At its SAP TechEd '03 Developers' Conference this week, SAP will aggressively reach out to Java and .NET developers, offering a sneak peek at an array of integrated tools and web-to-legacy deployment technologies, and launching a developers' community portal. SAP execs say it's all aimed to making it easier for non-SAP devs to build enterprise-class web services that integrate with SAP back-end legacy systems. SAP has begun shipping the first elements of an entire developer-tuned suite of tools, integration servers and web services frameworks for both Java and .NET devs, aimed to help devs speed design-time development and real-time deployments of web-to-SAP UIs, portals and new business applications.

Enhance Ant with XSL Transformations. Real-World Examples of Ant's Power and Flexibility.
Jim Creasman, IBM developerWorks
Ant is a Java-based build tool from the Jakarta project at the Apache Software Foundation. It has become a de facto standard for building Java projects. Ant scripts derive their structure, along with much of their ease of use, from XML. Also, because Ant scripts are XML, they can be parsed, modified, generated, or otherwise transformed programatically using eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). You can even invoke the stylesheet processor from an Ant task. This article focuses on three examples, each illustrating some problem the author encountered in real work. In each case, he demonstrates a solution based on combining a base Ant script with one or more XSL stylesheets. XSLT adds flexibility to what would otherwise be a static script.
See also: Apache Ant Project