XML and Web Services In The News - 13 September 2005

IBM Expands SOA Portfolio
Renee Boucher Ferguson, eWEEK
As part of a sweeping realignment of its software and related services portfolio -- now geared more than ever toward enabling SOA (service- oriented architecture) implementations -- IBM has announced a slew of new and enhanced software offerings from its WebSphere integration portfolio. Along with that comes a tighter integration between WebSphere, Rational and Tivoli products, and new services to support SOA deployments. The new offerings are based on four software fundamentals: modeling, assembling, deploying and managing a set of capabilities in an SOA. In terms of services, IBM's goal is to help users more quickly deploy and manage an SOA, and enable partners to get their customers on board with SOA. In the modeling arena, IBM announced its WebSphere Business Modeler for SOAs, a tool that enables both business and IT users to model and design process flows before they are deployed. To support easier SOA deployments, IBM announced a lightweight version of an enterprise service bus. The WebSphere ESB, which utilizes some components of IBM's WebSphere application server, is geared toward the integration of Web services-based applications. IBM also announced its new WebSphere Process Server, which helps do the choreography around a set of business processes, data and events; it also enables users to manage processes during run-time.
See also: The announcement

XRIs Resolve Identity Management Dilemma
Dave Mcalpin, Network World
Identity management is a big productivity win for companies, but implementation can be challenging. A company's partner, for instance, might identify each of its employees by personnel number, a distinguished name or an e-mail address. Merely recognizing the type of identifier provided can be difficult or impossible, and supporting them all is costly. OASIS has developed a unified identifier scheme to help companies tackle today's rampant identity management interoperability problems. The Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) specification establishes an interoperable framework for expressing, resolving and establishing equivalence between identifiers of any kind for any resource type, including people, applications, network devices and corporate assets. XRIs build on the ubiquitous Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) standards -- widely used by identity management solutions -- by defining standard ways to express characteristics such as type, language and date. The lightweight HTTP -- and XML-based XRI resolution framework lets a consuming application quickly and easily discover metadata about those resources, such as an alternative synonym identifier that works better in the application's local identity management system.
See also: OASIS XRI TC

Compound XML Document Profiles for Rich Content: Extensibility Alternatives Using XML Schema
Steve Speicher and Kevin E. Kelly, IBM developerWorks
XML-based, declarative functional schemas like XHTML, XForms, XML Events, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), SMIL, VoiceXML, and XHTML Mobile Profile are examples of schemas that provide specific functionality for creating rich content. Some schemas are written specifically to be embedded, such as XForms. Other schemas have been adapted for embedding through the use of newer schemas that forge a combination of existing functional schemas (such as XHTML and VoiceXML's X+V profile). The XForms specification includes guidance for enclosing schemas, but an actual combining driver schema does not exist. In the case of X+V, a separate driver schema was created by copying the VoiceXML schema and replacing specific elements with XHTML schema elements. This article explores several extension capabilities of XML Schema and concludes that, for purposes of building Compound Document Format profiles, the pattern of building modularized schemas and using redefines is the ideal approach. The use of these schema constructs, in light of redefine construct restrictions, is often very useful in schema design.
See also: W3C Compound Document Framework

One More License Down, Fifty More to Go
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, eWEEK
A few months back, the Open Source Initiative announced that it was going to start cutting back on the number of open-source licenses. It's a good first step that companies are finally realizing that there's no point in keeping around 'vanity' open-source licenses. So they're killing them off. Intel did it when it deep-sixed the Intel Open Source License, (aka 'BSD License with Export Notice'). And, much more recently, Sun did us all a favor by putting a stake in the heart of SISSL Sun Industry Standard Source License. Unlike Intel's license, which was little used, SISSL was actually an important license. It was one of the two licenses which covered the popular OpenOffice.org office suite. Are you listening Computer Associates, IBM, Lucent and Nokia? Still, even if these, and all the other companies with vanity licenses, killed their licenses off, we're still left with several dozen licenses. At least one organization, the Jabber Software Foundation, the people behind the popular Jabber, aka XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol IM (instant messaging), standard has asked that its Jabber Open Software License no longer be recommended for use.

Sprint Rationalizes Its Infrastructure with SOA
Galen Gruman, InfoWorld
As far back as four years ago, Sprint's IT staff was already headed toward SOA; they just didn't know it yet. The the enterprise-focused Sprint Business Services (SBS) defines three kinds of services: atomic, aggregate, and composite. Atomic services might expose a single API and are usually transactional in nature. Aggregate services may involve calling sequences of atomic services, much like one Java class calling other classes. Composite services, on the other hand, require orchestration or choreography. A composite Web service implements a process or workflow involving multiple atomic or aggregate Web services, including managing data flow among them. In a few cases, SBS uses the Vitria EAI platform to implement a composite service's process at the Web service level. SBS also uses BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) to orchestrate services in b-to-b deployments. SBS encapsulates its mainframe applications as 'virtual services within EJB wrappers that expose the functionality of the applications using SOAP, WSDL, and XML schema. This presentation meets two needs: It keeps the EJBs' internal business logic private while also offering trading partners a standards-based approach to consuming the service. The system supports several data exchange standards, since SBS service providers and customers use a wide range of technologies. Flat-file text and basic XML are the most common choices.
See also: BPEL references

Denmark Pioneers Adoption of UBL-based Standards
European Communities, eGovernment News
Over the last year, European countries coordinated by the European Commission's IDABC programme have been working on a common European process and data model for e-tendering, e-ordering and e-invoicing. This work has resulted in a structured list of 130 requirements to UBL, many of them in support of European taxation practices. Most of these requirements will be met in the next version of UBL, ensuring that the UBL standard is able to handle cross-border trade among European countries in the future. The UBL standard now has a strong user base in the Scandinavian countries, and Europe could become the first region in the world to harvest the benefits of a standardised set of XML e-business messages. The Danish law on public payments has set a number of requirements for both Danish and international suppliers of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to support the UBL-based invoice format. The law became effective on 1 February 2005, and since then e-invoicing has become mandatory for all public entities and their suppliers.
See also: UBL references

Tibco Apps Rich With AJAX
Jim Wagner, Internetnews.com
Software vendor Tibco released the first major update to its rich Internet application (RIA) developer tool since acquiring the technology last year, officials said this week. General Interface 3.0 (GI 3.0), originally developed by a privately held company of the same name, was acquired by Tibco in October 2004 to round out its service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy at the presentation level. Tibco develops business integration, real-time messaging and business process management (BPM) software targeting a number of industries to include financial services, health care, government, transportation, retail and telecommunications. Each industry can take advantage of applications tied to infrastructure databases that deliver desktop-style functionality over the Web. The tool simplifies the development of rich Web-based applications using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX). GI has been on the market since 2000, long before the term AJAX was coined. But officials expect its new-found popularity to give the tool more recognition in the near future.
See also: The announcement

Patent Bill Would Make Sweeping Changes
Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com
Congress is about to consider a controversial proposal from Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, that would grant a patent to the first person to submit the paperwork -- a standard that's common outside the United States. The legislation suddenly has become a flash point about everything that's right with the U.S. patent system -- and everything that's wrong with it. Technology companies fighting expensive patent cases are hoping the bill will reduce litigation, while open-source advocates say it will do nothing to hinder the rising tide of software patents being issued. Many people feel that the measure will make only modest improvements, if any, to the quality of patents being awarded. Smith's bill, called the Patent Reform Act of 2005, also has drawn the ire of independent inventors, who have said it will unfairly hurt anyone without a battalion of patent lawyers who can race to the Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Va. The rule probably would have kept Gould from being awarded the laser patents he eventually got.
See also: The photos