XML and Web Services In The News - 10 October 2003

IBM, Cisco Help Networks Help Themselves. Companies Announce Drive Toward Self-Diagnostic, Self-Healing Networks.
Stephen Lawson, InfoWorld
IBM Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. want to make it easier to diagnose and solve problems in an enterprise's IT infrastructure. Pinpointing the causes of failures and solving the root problems takes up a lot of IT staff time. The companies have announced a drive toward self- diagnostic and self-healing networks. Initial aims of the program include coming up with a common way for parts of the system to log events and providing software for an administrator to see and analyze problems. The IBM-developed Common Base Event (CBE) specification defines a standard format for event logs, which devices and software use to keep track of transactions and other activity. As a common format, CBE can simplify that process, [IBM's Ric] Telford said. Future products should use CBE as their native log format, but "log adapters" can define mappings between current proprietary log formats and CBE. IBM has submitted the CBE draft to the OASIS WSDM Technical Committee.
See also: CBE References

Sun's StarOffice 7 Shines
Jason Brooks, eWEEK
Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice 7 productivity suite is a capable cross-platform alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Office that comes at a price too attractive for enterprises to ignore. The follow-on to last year's impressive StarOffice 6 starts at less than one-sixth the cost of Microsoft Office 2003, yet in eWEEK Labs' tests, the StarOffice suite's word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications performed well and exhibited strong support for Microsoft's binary DOC, XLS and PPT file formats. This means it will likely coexist well with Office 2003. For a free alternative, companies can check out OpenOffice.org 1.1, the open-source project on which StarOffice is based. StarOffice includes additional (albeit not free) components that OpenOffice.org does not, such as a spelling checker, a thesaurus and Software AG's Adabas D database application. OpenOffice ships with its own, separate spell checker and thesaurus.
See also: OpenOffice Version 1.1

Web Services Framework Moves Forward
Robert Jaques, VNUNET.com
OASIS, the industry-funded web services standards forum whose members include Sun, Oracle and Fujitsu, has unveiled plans to develop the Web Services Composite Application Framework. The consortium said that its WS-CAF technical committee is working to define a set of royalty-free, interoperable, modular specifications that will enable the development of composite applications, from simple to complex combinations of web services. WS-CAF developers plan to liaise with efforts of the World Wide Web Consortium, including the XML Protocol, Web Service Architecture, Web Service Description, and Web Service Choreography Working Groups. WS-CAF specifications will provide Web Service Definition Language definitions for context, coordination, and transactions. Message formats will be specified as secure object access protocol headers and/or body content.
See also: the WS-CAF TC Announcement

InfoPath Makes Office Shine. Office 2003 Offers Little to Individual Users, But XML Features Should Wow IT Shops.
Tom Yager, InfoWorld
In terms of providing features that individual users need, the MS Office productivity suite reached the zenith of its evolution with Office 2000. But Office 2003 Professional Enterprise Edition and Professional Edition for retail deliver XML capabilities that are compelling to companies as a whole, and Enterprise Edition's inclusion of InfoPath turns Office into a powerful front end for IT shops rooted in XML. In the main, Office 2003 is an excellent piece of work, but two key features are missing. Formatting information, which can be relevant to the interpretation of a document, is either stripped from exported XML documents, or retained in a needlessly complex format. Worst of all is the absence of XML support in Outlook, which continues to use an opaque data store for messages. To be truly useful [however,] XML support must be consistent across all Office editions, and not limited to the Professional and Enterprise editions.

Antenna House Issues Major Upgrade to XSL Formatter for High-Quality Print.
XML Cover Pages
Antenna House has released XSL Formatter Version 3.0, incorporating an entirely new formatting engine developed from scratch. XSL Formatter V3.0 implements an XSL-FO (Extensible Style Language-Formatting Objects) processor conforming to the W3C XSL Recommendation. It supports high-speed formatting of large XML documents for production-quality printing and output to PDF. V3.0 features enhanced SVG support, faster speed, higher capacity, and new integration interfaces.