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XML and Web Services In The News - 2 October 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP
HEADLINES:
Tibco to Open Source, Upgrade AJAX Toolkit
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Tibco has announced its intention to offer its General Interface rich
Internet application toolkit via an open source format. The product,
based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is being made
available via open source as part of the company's announcement of
General Interface Version 3.2, which supports the Firefox 1.5 browser.
The company is offering the beta release on Monday. Other new features
in Version 3.2 include additional components such as tree grids and
scalable vector graphics for Firefox. On the market since 2001, General
Interface is recognized as one of the most mature products in the AJAX
space, according to Kevin Hakman, product marketing manager for Tibco
General Interface: "It's a toolkit that enables developers to create
and deploy AJAX applications that look and feel like desktop GUIs...
It's got a vast set of components and then a set of visual tools that
enable very rapid assembly of these desktop-style GUIs." Tibco's
reasoning behind its open source plan is that this will accelerate
adoption and development of solutions. The company will offer the
product via dual licensing, with an open source model based on the BSD
(Berkeley Software Distribution) license and a fee-based option that
features enterprise warrantees, maintenance and support. "The starting
price for enterprise deployments has been around $25,000, and this move
is designed to remove that entry barrier," Hakman said. Although the
product is installed at hundreds of organizations and used by thousands
of developers, Tibco has set it sights on enticing millions of
developers.
See also: the announcement
Semantic Annotations for WSDL: Usage Guide
Rama Akkiraju and Brahmananda Sapkota (eds), W3C Working Draft
Members of the W3C Semantic Annotations for Web Services Description
Language (SAWSDL) Working Group have released an initial Working Draft
for "Semantic Annotations for WSDL: Usage Guide." According to its
abstract: "Web services provide a standards-based foundation for
exchanging information between distributed software systems. The World-
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard Web Services Description Language
(WSDL 2.0) specifies a standard way to describe the interfaces of a Web
Service at a syntactic level and how to invoke it. While the syntactic
descriptions provide information about the structure of input and output
messages of an interface and how to invoke them, semantics are needed
to describe what a Web service actual does. These semantics when
expressed in formal languages disambiguate the description of Web
services interfaces paving the way for automatic discovery, composition
and integration of software components. WSDL does not explicitly provide
mechanisms to specify the semantics of a Web service. Semantic
Annotations for WSDL (SAWSDL) is an effort to define mechanisms by
which semantic annotations can be added to WSDL components. Many of the
concepts in SAWSDL are based on an earlier effort WSDL-S, a W3C
submission. This usage guide is an accompanying document to SAWSDL
specification. It presents examples to illustrate how to associate
semantic annotations with a Web service that could be used for
classifying, discovering, matching, composing, and invoking Web
services. Some of the examples illustrated in this document use RDF
and OWL Web Ontology Language for representing ontologies. The W3C
SAWSDL Working Group has also issued a Last Call Working Draft for
"Semantic Annotations for WSDL."
See also: the SAWSDL Last Call WD
Advantages of the Ajax/REST Architectural Style for Immersive Web Applications
Bill Higgins, IBM developerWorks
In just 15 years, the World Wide Web has grown from a researcher's
experiment to one of the technological pillars of the modern world.
Originally invented to let people easily publish and link to
information, the Web has also grown into a viable platform for software
applications. But as applications have become more immersive by using
rich application models and generating personalized content, their
architectures have increasingly violated Representational State
Transfer (REST), the Web's architectural style. These violations tend
to decrease application scalability and increase system complexity.
The emerging Ajax Web client architectural style lets immersive Web
applications achieve harmony with the REST architectural style. They
can enjoy REST's desirable properties while eliminating the undesirable
properties experienced when an application violates REST's principles.
This article explains how and why Ajax and REST succeed together for
immersive Web applications. For the class of Web applications that I
call immersive Web applications, well-designed Ajax/REST applications
are far superior to traditional server-wide Web applications with
regard to user experience, responsiveness, and scalability. However,
an architectural style's run-time characteristics aren't the only
determinant of success for a software project and Web application.
There are some tough non-run-time problems with creating Ajax/REST
applications, including problems of large-scale JavaScript development,
cultural issues, and packaging problems.
WebEx offers SOA-based Integration Platform
Richard Gincel, InfoWorld
WebEx, a provider of on-demand Web conferencing and interactive online
products, launched the WebEx Connect platform last Monday, following
SaaScon, a software-as-a-service conference. Powered by the MediaTone
Network, a composite collaboration and application platform, the WebEx
Connect platform will allow users to integrate data from more than one
application to create a collaborative workspace custom designed for
their workflow or business process. Using open protocols and WebEx
connector APIs, developers can adapt on-demand, desktop and enterprise
applications to the platform or create new composite applications.
Because of its SOA underpinnings (a result of the company's partnership
with Cordys), WebEx Connect will facilitate an array of business process
mash-up capabilities to knowledge workers across a wide spectrum.
Several major companies, including BMC Software, Genius.com, Mindjet,
and OpSource, have signed on to the platform, allowing their developers
to create and deliver composite applications to the large community of
WebEx users — as many as 25,000 companies with nearly 2 million
registered users, according to company officials. If it succeeds in
enticing developers and users, the platform could rival Salesforce.com's
AppExchange, which went live in early 2006.
Creating Practical Portable Portlets: Developing Portlets Using JSR 168 and WSRP
Sabbu Allamaraju and Alex Toussaint, SOA Web Services Journal
JSR 168 has changed the playing field for portal development, letting
vendors (and especially ISVs) develop portlets that various portals can
consume. Likewise, WSRP has provided a standard so portals can consume
portlets that reside remotely from the consuming portal. But questions
remain. How does WSRP relate to other development patterns such as
Struts and JSF? When should you use WSRP as opposed to JSR 168? As a
developer developing for a portal customer, how do you know where to
start? This article will discuss two approaches to deploying portlets:
the use of Java Specification Request (JSR) 168, which addresses the
characteristics and specifications for a Java portlet, and the
specification for Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) from OASIS,
one of the industry organizations defining Web standards. Both of these
standards seek to define portlets that are independent of the portal
that they may be tasked to run in, allowing for the portability and
interchangeability of these portal objects. The specifications are for
both the developers of the portlet itself as well as the developers of
the portals in which they run. In both cases, the standards define the
areas of presentation, aggregation, security, and portlet lifecycle.
Portlets are small objects (in our case, Java objects) that provide
specific services running in a portal system. Web portals are a kind of
content management system, letting registered users access password-
protected information from a number of different sources. The
information owners who, in most cases, aren't the portal owners update
the information in the portal, relieving the portal owners of that
onerous task. And the user controls all this through a set of
"preferences screens" so there's no need to learn complex programming
to design the portal. New sources of information are appearing daily
with an unbelievable range of content, enough to satisfy even the most
selective users. The ability to include diverse content into a single
viewable portal is dependent on both the portal developers and the
content developers complying with a stringent set of portal and portlet
standards.
See also: the OASIS WSRP TC web site
JackBe Aims to Work Magic with SOA and AJAX
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
JackBe has developed a new development and deployment platform that
takes advantage of the strengths of both Asynchronous JavaScript and
XML-style development and service-oriented architecture. At the
AJAXWorld conference in Santa Clara, JackBe will launch Presto, its
new REA (Rich Enterprise Application) platform, which will leverage
the strengths of both SOA and AJAX to enable enterprises to tap into
underlying business services to create rich Internet applications.
Formerly known internally at JackBe by the code name Project Renaissance,
the new Presto platform consists of four primary parts: a development
tier, a client tier, an AJAX Service Bus, and a service tier consisting
of a Service Gateway and Enterprise Mashup Server. The development tier
consists of an Eclipse-based PDE (Power Developer Environment) and a
browser-based BDE (Business Developer Environment). The client tier is
based on JackBe's existing NQ AJAX development and deployment framework.
The ASB (AJAX Service Bus) is a browser-to-server messaging component
that provides secure, bi-directional, single-connection network
messaging; in addition, the ASB brings to the enterprise the capability
to extend an ESB (enterprise service bus) and middleware through to
the browser.
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