XML and Web Services In The News - 6 November 2006

Provided by OASIS | Edited by Robin Cover

This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP AG



HEADLINES:

 Good Call: Delaware uses VoiceXML to Expand Online
 Q&A with Bill Hilf: Microsoft Open to Open-Source Pacts
 Alliance Statement On Microsoft/Novell Collaboration Regarding Document Format Compatibility
 BEA Updates SOA Integration Offerings
 Exploit XML Indexes for XML Query Performance in DB2 9
 SOA: Under Construction
 Berkeley's Mesh Network: Dust in the RFID Wind


Good Call: Delaware uses VoiceXML to Expand Online
Rob Thormeyer, Government Computer News
Internet access has not been widely available in Delaware's rural pockets, which stretch across the state, or to vacation homes along the coast. As a result, the state's efforts to offer services over the Internet were not reaching a considerable portion of the population living outside the one metropolitan area. Solution: Through the use of VoiceXML, Access Delaware has brought the state's online services into the homes of thousands. Citizens call an 800-number and receive information on where to find free Internet access and where to vote, as well as drought conditions and, soon, data on health emergencies. VoiceXML is an Extensible Markup Language that communicates through a telephone or voice browser rather than a graphical one. The language accepts spoken input so it is accessible for those with visual challenges, although users can punch responses into the phone keypad as well. VoiceXML is open standard, making it easy for IT staff with some Web experience to update the system. Delaware runs VoiceXML on a Microsoft Windows platform, but officials said it can run on any operating system. DTI collaborated with other state agencies to determine what information to make available over the phone. For instance, Access Delaware first contained information about where citizens without a computer could get online for free. More recently, the state added a feature that lets citizens track their tax returns and a connection to the Delaware Helpline, which provides live assistance.
See also: the W3C Voice Browser Activity

Q&A with Bill Hilf: Microsoft Open to Open-Source Pacts
Jeremy Kirk, InfoWorld
Last week's pact between Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. has led to widespread speculation over the long-term impact on the adoption of open-source software. Under the deal, the companies will work on ways to enable Novell's Linux distribution, Suse, and Microsoft's Windows operating system to work better together. They also reached a patent truce in which users of the other's software can't be sued for infringement, and Microsoft agreed not to sue noncommercial open- source developers. Microsoft's Bill Hilf, general manager for platform strategy, spoke further about the deal with IDG News Service, addressing how Microsoft views its intellectual property relative to Linux. Hilf: "This is an intellectual-property deal. There will be an overlap at some point between our intellectual property and open source that we have to resolve. We knew that. It was going to happen. It was just a question of when. We said let's put in place something that allows us to a) establish a process for how we can work with an open-source company on our intellectual property, b) do it in such as way that it can still work within the GNU GPL (general public license) and c) how do we do this in a way where we can clearly draw the line between the community developer, the noncommercial open-source community guy writing code and the commercial developer who is using open-source code. Doing one of those is easy, doing two of them is actually hard but possible. Doing all three is very, very hard because one can contradict the other. What we are trying to do is draw the line between people who make money from this and people who don't. We needed to have the peace of mind both for the customers who are choosing to put this stuff into their environment as well as developers."
See also: the announcement

Alliance Statement On Microsoft/Novell Collaboration Regarding Document Format Compatibility
Staff, ODF Alliance
The OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance), a broad cross-section of organizations, academia and industry dedicated to improving access to electronic government documents, issued the following statement regarding Microsoft and Novell's announcement regarding collaboration on document format compatibility: "We see yesterday's announcement as further acknowledgement from Microsoft that ODF is something customers are demanding," said Marino Marcich, Managing Director of the ODF Alliance. "By making it easier for some Open Office users to access files stored in Microsoft's Office Open XML format, it makes it easier for customers to adopt ODF without worrying about the difficulty of tapping into files stored in a proprietary format that others may send them, or that they may have stored in their own systems.""Open Office and other ODF-supporting implementations already support a variety of legacy or proprietary formats, and Office Open XML will be a welcome addition. In terms of Microsoft's translator project that would save Word files in the ODF format, the Alliance still thinks that the translator project does not yet provide true interoperability, and we encourage Microsoft to provide native support in Office that will allow users to save to ODF as easily as any other format."
See also: ODF references

BEA Updates SOA Integration Offerings
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
BEA Systems is enhancing its enterprise integration strategy and solution portfolio to help customers realize the business benefits of service-oriented architecture. The new pieces of the San Jose, Calif., company's SOA puzzle include a new version of the BEA WebLogic Integration (WLI) product and a new version of BEA AquaLogic Service Bus (ALSB). BEA WLI 9.2 features several new functional and performance enhancements including an Eclipse-based development environment for ease of design and developer productivity; controls that are compliant with the Apache Beehive project; Java annotations based on JSR-175 for standards-based code generation; improved design-time experience, performance and usability for processes that span human and system resources; and a new Worklist module with a drag-and-drop design environment, forms-based test console, and out-of-the-box portlets for user interaction to enable powerful exception management in fine- grained processes, [Rosemary ] Stark said. Kelly Emo, director of BEA Integration product marketing, said BEA ALSB 2.6 features several new enhancements to expand connectivity to a wide array of services, enhance standards support for messaging and provisioning, and provide additional configuration and deployment flexibility, including the ability to invoke a database lookup directly from ALSB to support message enrichment and validation scenarios; new features for customizing configuration scenarios and automating deployment including design-time APIs for configuration actions, support for rules-based deployments and support for a much more extensive list of environment variables; support for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP ) 1.2; and support for Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Version 3 automated import of business services to ensure that changes made in a business service registry, such as BEA AquaLogic Service Registry, are immediately reflected in the Service Bus.
See also: InfoWorld

Exploit XML Indexes for XML Query Performance in DB2 9
Matthias Nicola, IBM developerWorks
This article presents a set of guidelines for writing XML queries and creating XML indexes in a consistent manner so that indexes speed up your queries as expected. Also learn what to look for in XML query execution plans to detect performance issues, and find out how to fix them. A downloadable "cheat sheet" summarizes the most important guidelines. DB2 9 provides pureXML storage together with XML indexes, XQuery and SQL/XML as query languages, XML schema support, and XML extensions to utilities such as Import/Export and Runstats. Just as for relational queries, indexes are crucial for high performance of your XQuery and SQL/XML statements. DB2 allows you to define path-specific XML indexes on XML columns. That means you can use them to index selected elements and attributes that are frequently used in predicates and joins. When your application submits a relational or XML query to DB2, the query compiler compares the query predicates with existing index definitions and determines if any available indexes can be used to execute the query. This process is known as "index matching" and produces a (possibly empty) set of eligible indexes for the given query. This set is input to the cost-based optimizer that decides whether to use any of the eligible indexes or not. In this article, the focus is on index matching rather than the optimizer's index selection.
See also: XML and Databases

SOA: Under Construction
Galen Gruman, InfoWorld
As enterprises build SOAs, the going is pretty slow, thanks mainly to a vastly increasing number of dependencies. Here's what you can learn from what's happening on the ground Ask anyone in charge of constructing an SOA (service-oriented architecture), and they'll tell you that the hardest part isn't the technology; it's redrawing the business processes that provide the basis for the architecture — and the often contentious reshuffling of roles and responsibilities that ensues. Many SOA practitioners say that, so it must be true. But the technology part isn't necessarily easy, either. After all the planning and strategizing is complete, services and their messaging infrastructure must be provisioned and managed, alongside whatever platforms, applications, and systems are already in place. The ultimate objective of SOA is a supremely agile infrastructure, where IT develops composite applications atop of a layer of abstraction that spans multiple platforms and domains across the enterprise. But nobody can "boil the ocean" and achieve that goal all at once. Practical SOA initiatives begin with a related set of business processes that would clearly benefit from greater flexibility — where market conditions are in constant flux, for example, or new services must be deployed on the fly for competitive reasons. At some point that top-down approach meets the bottom-up reality of existing software assets and infrastructure.
See also: the editor

Berkeley's Mesh Network: Dust in the RFID Wind
Renee Boucher Ferguson, eWEEK
UC/Berkeley researchers have created tiny wireless "motes" (aka network sensors) that use radio signals to communicate where they are located in physical space. The end goal: an RFID network that could revolutionize the industry with its ability to locate tagged items without the aid of readers. In January 2003 Smart Dust was commercialized when Pister co-founded Dust Networks. Now Pister is back at Berkeley full time, working with graduate student Steven Lanzisera on this next phase of sensor network innovation, dubbed RF Time of Flight. It could have a huge impact on the ubiquitous use of RFID. To understand RF Time of Flight, one has to go back to the basics of Smart Dust. Smart Dust refers to motes laid out in a mesh network that search and find one another, form a network, then communicate information back and forth. To set up a mesh network in a hospital or warehouse, for example, three access points are placed at random points and connected wirelessly to an interrogator. Then a dozen (or 100,000) motes come into the network, set up a multi-hub mesh, and start to communicate and report their nearest range. Measuring the distance from one mote to the next provides a reading of where tagged items are. RF Time of Flight adds radio communication and ranging capability. Intended to be about the size of a grain of sand or a piece of dust — the motes from Dust Networks are currently about the size of a quarter — the motes contain sensors, computing circuits, bi-directional wireless technology, and an antenna and very low-battery power supply that are external to the chip. The motes can detect light, temperature or vibrations. Pister sees asset tracking as the biggest application area for RF Time of Flight, from tracking patients and doctors in a hospital to tracking assets in a theater of war (particularly since early Smart Dust funding came from the Department of Defense). But he also sees many other potential areas of use.


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