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XML and Web Services In The News - 31 October 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
Why XForms? An Apologia and Exegesis
Elliotte Rusty Harold, IBM developerWorks
This article explains the problems XForms are intended to solve,
including internationalization, accessibility, and device independence.
Like XML before it, XForms is designed to separate intention from
action, meaning from presentation. It's designed to be a generic
description of the input a form needs to collect. An XForm says little
to nothing about how the form will be rendered or how the user will
interact with it. The same form can be rendered one way in a browser,
a different way in a phone tree with touchtone and voice-recognition
input, and a third way on paper to be filled out with ink and scanned
in using optical character recognition. The XForms approach requires
a significant shift in how you think about and design software. It's
similar to moving from presentation-based markup in Word to semantic-
based markup in XML. In the programming domain, it's similar to moving
from an imperative language such as the Java language to a declarative
language such as SQL. When you're designing XForms, it's necessary to
think about the information you want to get from the user rather than
what the form will look like. I'm not sure this style of form design
is any harder than traditional visual layouts, but it's more indirect
and it's unfamiliar to most Web designers. It definitely requires some
getting used to. The additional layer of indirection may not be worth
it for simple applications with a single delivery mechanism. However,
for more complex applications, it shows real promise to improve
accessibility, localizability, security, robustness, and other desirable
characteristics.
See also: XML and Forms
Microsoft XML Expert Joins Open-Source Middleware Firm
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
Startup WSO2 has announced that a former Microsoft technologist has
joined the open-source middleware company. Jonathan Marsh, a former
technical diplomat at Microsoft, has joined the Colombo, Sri Lanka,
company as director of mashup technologies. At WSO2, Marsh will help
set the overall technical direction of the company's open-source
middleware platforms and lead development of the company's forthcoming
server-side mashup platform for situational applications, business
process management and monitoring, said Sanjiva Weerawarana, founder
and chief executive of WSO2. Marsh worked at Microsoft for 10 years,
where he was technical diplomat for XML and Web services technologies.
He also helped push the development of the APIs that upgraded XML
processing in the browser. Marsh was a Microsoft representative at
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and contributed to the development
of such W3C specifications as XPath, XSLT, XML Base, xml:id, Xinclude
and the XPointer Framework, according to WSO2 officials. In addition,
Marsh was recently reappointed as co-chair of the W3C Web Services
Description Working Group, they said. Marsh will continue that role
and maintain his involvement in various W3C working groups and in
OASIS technical committees. Marsh joins a WSO2 team made up of experts
in the Web services, standards and open-source spaces — particularly
as members of the Apache Software Foundation.
See also: the announcement
IBM Launches SOA Development Centers in India, China
John Ribeiro, NetworkWorld.com
IBM is setting up development centers in Beijing and Pune, India that
will focus on developing industry-specific service-oriented architecture
services to be reused across various customers. While the SOA Solutions
Center in Pune will focus on the insurance and healthcare industries,
its counterpart in Beijing will develop SOA services for the banking
industry and government, Jeby Cherian, head of IBM's Global Business
Solutions Center in Bangalore, India, told reporters Tuesday in
Bangalore. The Beijing and Pune centers will have about 500 staff each.
The new centers will take advantage of the industry knowledge created
in IBM's global delivery centers in India and China. The global
delivery centers in India do work for large clients in the automotive,
insurance and healthcare industries, while the delivery centers in
China work for large banking and telecommunications clients. IBM also
has a SOA design center in China that works with IBM's clients. In
March of this year, IBM set up a Global Business Solutions Center in
Bangalore to operate as the company's global hub for the management and
creation of reusable software components, including SOA services. The
Global Business Solutions Center has created about 100 new reusable
components in the last six months.
Presence Authorization Rules
Jonathan Rosenberg (ed), IETF Internet Draft
Members of the IETF SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging
Extensions (SIMPLE) Working Group have published an updated Internet
Draft for "Presence Authorization Rules." The Session Initiation Protocol
(SIP) for Instant Messaging and Presence (SIMPLE) specifications allow
a user, called a watcher, to subscribe to another user, called a
presentity, in order to learn their presence information. This
subscription is handled by a presence agent. However, presence
information is sensitive, and a presence agent needs authorization from
the presentity prior to handing out presence information. As such, a
presence authorization document format is needed. Authorization is a
key function in presence systems. Authorization policies, also known as
authorization rules, specify what presence information can be given to
which watchers, and when. This specification defines an Extensible
Markup Language (XML) document format for expressing presence
authorization rules. Such a document can be manipulated by clients
using the XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP), although other
techniques are permitted. A presence authorization document is an XML
document, formatted according to the schema defined in "Common Policy:
A Document Format for Expressing Privacy Preferences". Presence
authorization documents inherit the MIME type of common policy documents,
application/auth-policy+xml. As described in "Common Policy", this
document is composed of rules which contain three parts — conditions,
actions, and transformations. Each action or transformation, which is
also called a permission, has the property of being a positive grant
of information to the watcher. As a result, there is a well-defined
mechanism for combining actions and transformations obtained from
several sources. This mechanism is privacy safe, since the lack of any
action or transformation can only result in less information being
presented to a watcher.
See also: the WG Charter
Sun to Plug OpenDocument to Global Summit
Kevin Murphy, Computer Business Review Online
At the Internet Governance Forum summit this week in Athens, Greece,
Sun Microsystems Inc, along with supporters including IP Justice and
the Consumer Project on Technology, will urge governments to adopt
procurement practices that recognize open technology standards as
important, and forbid buying only proprietary technology. The inaugural
IGF meeting, which kicked off yesterday, is being attended by about
1,500 members of international governments, civil society organizations,
private companies, academics and media. The forum was created by the
UN-backed World Summit on the Information Society a year ago. Today,
Sun and others are expected to announce the formation of the "IGF
Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards", an apparently ad hoc coalition
of organizations that support open standards. This DCOS, which is not
believed to yet have any kind of formal IGF or intergovernmental
endorsement, will present two papers for discussion at a workshop in
Athens on Thursday. The papers, available for viewing now at cptech.org,
argue that adopting open standards is useful to spur adoption of the
internet in developing countries, and that open standards are currently
"in jeopardy" due to vendors plugging proprietary interfaces. "The
social value of interfaces has increased; so has their business value,"
the paper says. Software patents and proprietary APIs "are now being
used to manipulate the direction of the network effect and to thwart
widespread interoperability of computer programs" and this, the paper
says, "will be particularly harmful to developing countries." Another
paper to be discussed deals specifically with government procurement
practices. It addresses government as tech buyer, tech policymaker and
tech producer, and in each context urges governments to support open
standards.
Ingres Preps Database-Linux Package
James Niccolai, InfoWorld
Businesses will soon be able to try out a new product from Ingres that
aims to reduce maintenance work by combining the company's open-source
database with a version of Linux from rPath. The new software, code-
named Project Icebreaker, will be available as a free public beta in
about two weeks, with the final product scheduled to ship in December,
said Ingres Chief Technology Officer Dave Dargo. Ingres has combined its
database with only the parts of Linux that are needed to run the
database. It will then deliver patches and updates for the two products
in a single maintenance stream, reducing the time it takes to maintain
a separate database and OS, Dargo said. Ingres is positioning Icebreaker
as a general-purpose database for both small developer projects and
demanding enterprise applications. The software will be available for
free under the GPL, or customers can sign up for a maintenance and
support subscription, which will be priced the same as the Ingres 2006
database. Ingres refers to the product as an appliance although there
is no hardware to it yet; customers install the software themselves on
any x86-compatible server. Ingres is in talks with hardware vendors and
hopes eventually to offer the product preinstalled on servers. It's not
clear yet that customers want a database appliance. Oracle launched a
project several years ago called Raw Iron, which packaged its database
with an embedded operating system and a server. The product generated
little demand and was eventually killed off. Project Icebreaker is
different: Raw Iron gave customers little choice of hardware and locked
them onto a particular server platform, while Ingres will let customers
upgrade to new hardware as it's released; Ingres also hopes to
distinguish itself by being an open-source company, but one with an
enterprise heritage.
Hacker Unlocks Apple Music Download Protection
Staff, Reuters and InformationWeek
A hacker who as a teen cracked the encryption on DVDs has found a way
to unlock the code that prevents iPod users from playing songs from
download music stores other than Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes, his
company said Tuesday. Jon Lech Johansen, a 22-year-old Norway native
who lives in San Francisco, cracked Apple's FairPlay copy-protection
technology, said Monique Farantzos, managing director at DoubleTwist,
the company that plans to license the code to businesses. "What he did
was basically reverse-engineer FairPlay," she said. "This allows other
companies to offer content for the iPod." At the moment, Apple aims to
keep music bought from its iTunes online music store only available for
Apple products, while songs bought from other online stores typically
do not work on iPods. But Johansen's technology could help rivals sell
competing products that play music from iTunes and offer songs for
download that work on iPods as they seek to take a bite out of Apple's
dominance of digital music. Johansen's latest feat could help companies
such as Microsoft Corp., Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung Electronics
Co. Ltd., which have all announced plans over the past few months for
music download services combined with new devices to challenge Apple.
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