XML and Web Services In The News - 11 September 2006

Provided by OASIS | Edited by Robin Cover

This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by BEA Systems


HEADLINES:

 W3C Announces WebCGM 2.0 As a Candidate Recommendation
 WSDM Web Services Specification Approved
 Best Practices for Applying AJAX to JSR 168 Portlets
 Implement Two-Way Communication Among ESB Components
 IBM Prepares Open-Source Systems Management Initiative for Eclipse
 Sun Brings JRuby In-House
 BEA Delivers Tuxedo SOA Technology
 I Column Like I CM: XML, CMS, and DITA
 Merge XML and Java with XMLBeans in Commerce

W3C Announces WebCGM 2.0 As a Candidate Recommendation
Benoit Bezaire, David Cruikshank, Lofton Henderson, W3C CR
Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) is an ISO standard, defined by ISO/IEC 8632:1999, for the interchange of 2D vector and mixed vector/raster graphics. WebCGM is a profile of CGM, which adds Web linking and is optimized for Web applications in technical illustration, electronic documentation, geophysical data visualization, and similar fields. First published (1.0) in 1999 and followed by a second (errata) release in 2001, WebCGM unifies potentially diverse approaches to CGM utilization in Web document applications. It therefore represents a significant interoperability agreement amongst major users and implementers of the ISO CGM standard. 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. The design criteria for WebCGM aim at a balance between graphical expressive power on the one hand, and simplicity and implementability on the other. A small but powerful set of standardized metadata elements supports the functionalities of hyperlinking and document navigation, picture structuring and layering, and enabling search and query of WebCGM picture content.
See also: WebCGM Working Group

WSDM Web Services Specification Approved
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
OASIS has announced approval of the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) version 1.1 specification as an OASIS Standard. Proponents are billing the ratification as a boon to SOA. The status bestowed by OASIS signifies the organization's highest level of ratification. WSDM enables management applications to be built using Web services and allows resources to be controlled by many managers through a single interface, OASIS said. Version 1.1 integrates standard versions of dependent specifications WS-Addressing, WS-Resource Framework and WS-Notification. WSDM itself consists of two specifications: Management Using Web Services (MUWS), which defines how to represent and access manageability interfaces of resources as Web services, and Management of Web Services (MOWS), which defines how to manage Web services as resources and how to describe and access that manageability via MUWS. Companies including as BMC Software, CA, Hitachi, SOA Software and Tibco are endorsing WSDM 1.1. Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS, stated, "WSDM provides a much-needed method for enabling manageable Web services applications to interoperate across enterprise and organizational boundaries." He congratulated OASIS WSDM Technical Committee members for their commitment to collaborating on this solution.
See also: the OASIS announcement

Best Practices for Applying AJAX to JSR 168 Portlets
Greg Ziebold and Marina Sum, Sun Developer Network
A year ago, the article "Asynchronous Rendering of Portlet Content With AJAX Technology" demonstrated how to apply Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) to portlets. Since then, AJAX has become increasingly popular in the software arena and many new AJAX technologies have emerged. Examples are JavaScript libraries and toolkits, such as the Dojo Toolkit, the Yahoo! UI Library, the Google Web Toolkit, Script.aculo.us, and DHTML Goodies. In addition, new standards bodies like Open AJAX and the Dojo Foundation are key players. In light of the many developments in the past year and the host of feedback on how to use AJAX in portlets, this article describes several helpful tips and practices on how best to exploit AJAX in portlets that comply with the Java Specification Request (JSR) 168: Portlet Specification. This article refers to an updated version of the sample, AJAX Portlet Invoice Viewer, from the original article. You can download the binary Web archive (WAR) file. In the near future, this sample will reside in the Open Source Portlet Repository on java.net. Indisputably, limitations and caveats exist in programming AJAX with respect to JSR 168 portlets. But should that preclude you from taking advantage of this exciting new technology? Until JSR 286 is available, bear in mind the best practices and guidelines described in this article when applying AJAX and the associated JavaScript libraries to portlets.

Implement Two-Way Communication Among ESB Components
E.V.Mohan Vamsi, Java World
The Java Business Integration specification (JBI) defines a standard for building system integration applications using Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and XML-based messaging. JBI therefore aims to standardize the business-to-business integration space that was, until JBI, served by non-standardized products. Now, clients can use a JBI-compliant enterprise service bus (ESB) built by a vendor as a bundle of services that can integrate seamlessly with other services (even if developed by other vendors), as long as they adhere to the JBI specification — an impossibility before the JBI. The JBI specification also specifies three other message exchange patterns: In-Only, Robust In-Only, and In-Optional-Out. Each of these patterns has usage scenarios based on the reliability requirements of the message exchange. The role of consumer and producer components also varies based on the MEP chosen for communication. In this article, the author looks at how component-to-component interactions happen in a JBI-compliant way over an ESB, using the Loan Broker example bundled with the open source ESB ServiceMix.

IBM Prepares Open-Source Systems Management Initiative for Eclipse
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
IBM and other parties are set to propose an open source systems management initiative for consideration by the Eclipse Foundation, with managing SOA a goal of the plan, an IBM official said at the EclipseWorld 2006 conference on Friday. Tentatively referred to as COSMOS (Community-driven Systems Management in Open Source), the effort is to be proposed as an Eclipse top-level project centered on systems management tools. Resource modeling also is part of COSMOS. Enabling management of SOA and other environments is an intention of COSMOS, Weitzel said. He did not have a specific date on when COSMOS would officially be proposed to Eclipse. Principal focuses of COSMOS include: data collection and a server component, monitoring of the user interface, resource modeling and deployment. Resource instrumentation also is a critical component, with industry specifications including WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management), JMX (Java Management Extensions) and the Open Group's ARM (Application Resource Measuremen) standard all factored into COSMOS. Other projects also may play a role in COSMOS, such as the Eclipse Corona application lifecycle management project and the Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform... LogicBlaze this week announced availability of its LogicBlaze Fuse Development Environment, based on the Eclipse Web Tools Platform. Key features of the environment include a configuration and deployment control, including an Apache Maven-based object model to manage configuration of integration components; automatic code generation through Maven and full Eclipse debugging. Maven is an open source project management and software build tool. BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web services) orchestration also is supported, via implementation of the Apache Ode engine.
See also: Atom references

Sun Brings JRuby In-House
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
Sun Microsystems has hired the lead developers on the JRuby project, an open-source project aimed at developing an implementation of the Ruby language on the Java Virtual Machine. Rich Green, Executive Vice President of software at Sun, announced that Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, the chief maintainers of JRuby, will become Sun employees this month. They will be working full time on JRuby "and in particular paying attention to developer tools," a Sun spokeswoman said. Meanwhile, in a statement, Sun said: "Sun believes the Java platform is bigger than just the Java language, and we support giving developers a choice. Sun is planning to support multiple languages on the Java platform; plus, we'll be working toward interoperability between the Java platform and other languages." In a blog post about the hire, Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun, addressed what he believed would be commonly asked questions about Sun bringing the two developers aboard. As to why Sun hired them: "First, they are excellent developers. Technologies like Ruby are getting intense interest from the developer community, and Sun is interested in anything that developers care about." And from Bray's description, it sounds like Nutter and Enebo will be doing for Sun with Ruby what Jim Hugunin has done for Microsoft with Python: "They have to get JRuby to 1.0 and make sure that the major applications are running smoothly and are performant... Dynamically-typed languages like Ruby are only beginning to be accepted in the software mainstream, and many of the best practices and tools remain to be invented. Second, we'd like to ensure that the Ruby programming language, in its JRuby form, is available to the community of Java developers. Finally, there is a possibility that the Java platform may prove to be an attractive deployment option for existing Ruby applications in certain scenarios."
See also: InfoWorld

BEA Delivers Tuxedo SOA Technology
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
BEA Systems has completed development of BEA Services Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo 1.1, a solution for making applications that use BEA's Tuxedo run more efficiently on service-oriented architectures. Officials at BEA, in San Jose, Calif., said BEA SALT 1.1 is based on a configuration-driven model that presents existing Tuxedo services as Web services with no coding needed. BEA SALT complies with Web services specifications such as WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Addressing, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1, SOAP 1.2, and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1, which enables the BEA SALT technology to interoperate with other Web service products and development toolkits. The company said BEA SALT 1.1 provides SOA-enabling technology for large vertical applications in industries such as financial services, insurance, manufacturing, retail and government. The technology is available for download from BEA and the company is expected to officially announce BEA SALT 1.1 later in September.

I Column Like I CM: XML, CMS, and DITA
Bob Doyle, EContentMag.com
In a recent review of XML editing tools, I looked particularly at their support for DITA, especially integration of the DITA Open Toolkit (OT). The DITA OT is a reference implementation of the OASIS specification for "ready-made metadata" in the DITA DTDs and Schemas. Why is the DITA OT important and likely to affect your choice of a CMS in the near future. What Astoria and other XML CMS vendors are doing is putting an attractive, highly usable, interactive, and soon completely web-based interface on the Open Toolkit. They are fully integrating DITA into their menus. They are also moving OT processing away from the desktop to fast remote servers. The author/editor opens a project, typically seeing a DITA Map, a sort of virtual table of contents look into the content. Suzanne Mescan of Vasont says they connect DITA Maps and the DITA collections (Tasks, Concepts, References, and Topics) with bi-directional links, allowing users to simply drag-and-drop content to build new documents. When the writer clicks to publish to the Open Toolkit, dialog boxes ask for the desired publication channels for output: Help, HTML, PDF. They also ask for the destinations for the different results. Should files go back to the main repository, be sent via ftp to web servers, and so forth. At this point, says Debra Boczulak, product manager at XyEnterprise, a contributing tech writer can step away, the entire publication process controlled by a master configuration file, with editors notified, etc. Or a sophisticated hands-on manager can watch interactive reports while the OT builds the publications, dealing with any warnings or error messages on the fly. A complete audit trail logs the process for later analysis.
See also: the XML.org DITA Focus Area

Merge XML and Java with XMLBeans in Commerce
Kunal Mittal and Grace Walker, IBM developerWorks
In the SOA paradigm, providers and consumers communicate through messages. The messaging interface must be platform- and language- independent. Therefore, messages are often constructed using XML documents that conform to XML schema. Of course, application data is frequently stored in XML format as well. XML provides a basic syntax that you can use to share information between different kinds of computers, different applications, and different organizations without needing to pass through many layers of conversion. XML is important because it supports the enterprise application integration effort by providing a common, standardized platform upon which to build an integration infrastructure. XMLBeans allows you to use Java programming language with XML. Java programming language is an object-oriented language based on open, public standards. It's portable, robust and reliable. Because of these characteristics, it has been widely accepted and implemented in many industries, including entertainment. However, XML is not compatible with the Java programming language. XMLBeans is the best option for overcoming this impediment. XMLBeans is used for XML data binding. XMLBeans lets Java applications take complete advantage of XML. XMLBeans uses XML Schema to compile Java interfaces and classes that you can use to access and modify XML instance data. Using this technology, you can compile an XML Schema into a set of Java classes that can: (1) Use XMLBeans for all of the schemas encountered; (2) Access the XML data at whatever level is required. The XMLBeans compiler generates an object representation of an XML schema. This object representation is a set of generic Java classes and interfaces that represent the structure and constraints of the schema.


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