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XML and Web Services In The News - 10 November 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP AG
HEADLINES:
Web Services and Axis2 Architecture
Eran Chinthaka, IBM developerWorks
A big milestone was reached when Apache Axis2 1.0 was released in May
2006. Axis2 1.1 will be released in November 2006, with lots of new
features, mostly initiated by its user community, and numerous bug
fixes making it more and more stable. Axis2 has come a long way since
its Apache Axis and Apache SOAP origins. Not only is it more efficient,
modular, and XML-oriented, it is also flexible and extensible and it
implements enterprise features such as security and reliability. The
ease of use and functionality of Apache Axis2 really makes it the next
generation Web services platform. And in this article, you will see
how much has been achieved. You'll see a mature product that supports
the new generation of interoperable standards such as WS-Security,
WS-Reliable Messaging, and WS-Addressing. REST (REpresentational State
Transfer) is gaining recognition with the introduction of Web 2.0. For
some time, the REST camp and the SOAP camp have been debating which one
to use. We have tried to support both in Axis2, with recent efforts in
WSDL 2.0 to "marry" REST with Web services. In Axis2 users can invoke
all the Web services deployed in an Axis2 engine in a REST manner, but
with the constraints defined in the WSDL 2.0 HTTP Bindings specification.
Ruby on Rails Stakes Out Java's Turf
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Look out, Java. Ruby on Rails is staking out your turf. But all is not
lost for Java, which still enjoys advantages in areas such as security,
based on feedback at the Ruby on Rails Camp event, held Thursday at
the IBM Almaden Research Center. Not long into the morning festivities,
Ruby on Rails faced off against Java in the minds of the 150 attendees
and organizers. Ruby is a trendy, object-oriented scripting language;
Ruby on Rails is an open source Web framework leveraging Ruby. A theme
of the event was how to use Ruby in business applications. The event
was conducted in the "Unconference" style, in which presentations are
given in an informal, ad hoc basis by attendees; there is no submission
of papers several months in advance and no pre-set agenda. Attendees
gave presentation on topics ranging from Rails security to deploying
Rails to abate global warming. Demonstrations were offered on a
multitude of projects based on Rails, including Pongyow, a social
networking site featuring photos, video and blogging; www.spock.com, a
search engine; and Ozmozer, which enables information-sharing by
aggregating links and RSS feeds in a mashup style. Dunn showed MaxWiki,
which melds a wiki with content management. A developer of
DropVolley.com, which is a social networking site for adult-league
tennis, said Rails proved more productive at his current place of
employment than Microsoft's .Net technology. IBM is using Ruby on Rails
in efforts such as its Koala project, which involves development of a
wikipedia-like system for business processes. Users can record and play
back scripts. But the company thus far has made no commitments to
releasing any development tools for the Ruby on Rails crowd, said
Steve Cousins, senior manager for IBM's User-Focused Systems Research
Group at the San Jose site.
Planet Mobile Web Set in Motion
Staff, W3C Announcement
W3C has announced a "Planet Mobile Web" community service. The forum
is designed for discussions across blogs about mobile Web usage, and
is expected to generate new ideas. The Planet provides both an
aggregated HTML view and aggregated RSS/Atom feeds. The W3C Mobile
Web Initiative is a joint effort by authoring tool vendors, content
providers, handset manufacturers, browser vendors and mobile operators.
Currently, the W3C MWI is focusing on developing best practices for
"mobileOK" Web sites, device information needed for content adaptation,
and marketing and outreach activities. While becoming increasingly
popular, mobile Web access today still suffers from interoperability
and usability problems. Unlike the fixed Web, the mobile Web will go
where you go. No longer will you have to remember to do something on
the Web when you get back to your computer. You can do it immediately,
within the context that made you want to use the Web in the first
place. Moreover, with mobile devices, the Web can reach a much wider
audience, and at all times in all situations. It has the opportunity
to reach into places where wires cannot go, to places previously
unthinkable (e.g., medical info to mountain rescue scenes) and to
accompany everyone as easily as they carry the time in their
wristwatches. Today, many more people have access to mobile devices
than access to a desktop computer. This is likely to be very significant
in developing countries, where Web-capable mobile devices may play a
similar role for deploying widespread Web access as the mobile phone
has played for providing "plain old telephone service."
See also: W3C Mobile Web Initiative
Assessing the Impact of New Standards in Life Sciences
Jim Nichols, Scientist Live
Standards in the life sciences industry have made significant progress
in the last 15 years, with both industry and regulatory bodies
acknowledging the benefits. It can only be anticipated that these
standards will continue to evolve and new standards will be proposed.
The Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) has been
working to establish worldwide industry standards to support the
electronic collection, exchange, submission, and archival of clinical
trials data and metadata for medical and biopharmaceutical product
development. It also wants to share in the recognition of creating
regulatory submissions that allow for flexibility in scientific content
and are easily interpreted, understood, and navigated by regulatory
reviewers. Health Level 7 (HL7) was founded in 1987 and was granted
ANSI accreditation in 1994. HL7 is an ANSI accredited standards
developing organisation operating in the healthcare area. The hottest
topic for the past 18 months surrounding standards development has
been the new extensible markup language (XML) based labelling standards;
the HL7 standard Structured Product Labelling (SPL) for the USA, and
Europe's Product Information Management (PIM) standard. While these
standards provide significant benefit to the regulatory agencies in
terms of review of labelling changes and consistent dissemination of
information, it presented an entirely new authoring paradigm for
those individuals that produce labelling content. The shift to XML
required adoption of new technology and a much better understanding
of the content and potential reuse of the content across labelling
types.
See also: XML in Clinical Research and Healthcare
Query XML Data That Contains Namespaces
Cynthia M. Saracco, IBM developerWorks
Open a Web service definition language (WSDL) file or SOAP message,
convert a word processing document into XML, or skim through industry-
specific XML schemas; chances are you'll find references to multiple
namespaces. And that's something you need to consider if you want to
query XML data, because namespaces change everything. The widespread
use of namespaces in XML messages and documents impacts how application
developers must write their queries. Unfortunately, the relationship
between namespaces and popular query languages (such as SQL/XML and
XQuery) is often poorly understood. If you want to learn more than the
basics of XQuery and SQL/XML, you must understand how the presence of
XML namespaces in documents and messages impact the semantics of their
queries. If you don't, you may have unexpected — or undesired —
results. Fortunately, it's not hard to learn how to query XML documents
that contain namespaces. his article walks you through several common
scenarios to help you learn how to query XML data that contains
namespaces.
Orchestration, Choreography and the Demise of BPEL
John Evdemon, Blog
Keith Harrison-Broninski over at BP Trends offered an interesting take
on this topic from. This is the fourth part of an ongoing series on
the future of BPM. Keith asserts that BPMN will make BPEL unnecessary.
I've always thought about BPMN a sort of XMI for sharing a processes
model between design tools instead of an interoperable model for
instantiation and execution. Maybe I need to re-think my opinion on
this. I was surprised Keith didn't mention of the 1:1 mapping between
BPMN and XPDL 2.0. This avoids the lossy transformation of moving a
BPMN model into a BPEL serialization, since BPEL is effectively a subset
of what can be represented by BPMN (and most integration tools). The
most interesting part of Keith's article is his discussion of
orchestration and choreography. According to Keith, orchestrations
describe what the overall process appears to do without specifying how
any of this is to be implemented. This sounds vaguely to me like
abstract BPEL, a concept that, unfortunately, never seemed to catch on
with many people (its also where the value of BPEL can be realized).
The biggest challenge to a choreography is implementation. Since a
choreography is a form of peer-to-peer interaction there is no
"conductor" - this means that the choreography is an agreed-upon model
for interactions that consists of a series of orchestrations. Will
BPMN make BPEL irrelevant? It remains to be seen. In the meantime the
OASIS BPEL Technical Committee will be in Los Alamos next week for what
might be one of our final face to face meetings prior to standardization.
Another Open Document Format — From China
Andy Updegrove, ConsortiumInfo Blog
Last week I was a keynote speaker at a conference in Beijing convened
by the Chinese National Institution of Standardization, and learned
quite a bit about the objectives and strategies of government and
private industry in the PRC for utilizing open standards and open source
software. Some news: the Chinese have developed their own open document
format. It's called the Uniform Office Format (UOF), and it's been in
development since January of 2002; the first draft was completed in
December of last year. It includes word processing, spreadsheet and
presentation modules, and comprises GUI, format and API specifications.
Like both ODF and Office OpenXML, it is another "XML in a Zip file"
format. From what I understand, UOF was developed with less compulsion
to follow the lead of Microsoft Office and its fifteen years of
accumulating features, allowing UOF to be simpler rather than slavishly
faithful to (and therefore constrained by) what has come before. I'm
also told that the UOF format is based on existing Web standards, such
as SVG. I believe that the presentations from the conference will be
posted at the CNIS site sometime this week, and I will post the link
to the UOF Case Study presentation of Mr. Wu Zhigang when it is
available, which contains additional technical details. Beyond creating
the initial format standards, the goal is, " to lay [the] foundation
for other related standards, such as physical storage format,
application integration, etc. The standard will enhance compatibility
of different office application software products, improve their
usability, and finally make government procurement of home-made office
application software a reality." There is already an effort in place
to "harmonize" UOF and ODF, and from what I understand that process
should be less challenging than making ODF and Office OpenXML play
nicely together. The word "harmonize" is taken from a UOF working
group ballot last May, at which time the participants recommended
this activity.
Understanding the Service Lifecycle within a SOA: Run Time
Quinton Wall, BEA dev2dev
The ability to effectively manage the lifecycle of services is
fundamental to achieving success within a SOA initiative. Design-time
aspects of this type of management include such areas as service
categorization, modeling methodology, and concepts related to building
and composing services. This article focuses on the run-time aspects
of the service lifecycle, which include publishing and provisioning
the service, integrating the service into composite applications,
deploying the service, monitoring and managing its usage, and
evaluating the use of the service in a realistic setting, such as
production. As an architectural paradigm, SOA is aimed at promoting
reuse and allowing the business to bring new offerings to the market
more quickly. As a methodology, SOA requires a detailed understanding
of how an organization can rapidly adapt to change. The run-time
aspects of the SSLC are directly related to building organizational
flexibility.
Microsoft/Novell Deal Violates GPL?
Neil McAllister, InfoWorld Blog
Microsoft and Novell have described their recent partnership as a
historic effort to "bridge the divide" between open source and
proprietary software. But is it legal? According to Eben Moglen of
the Software Freedom Law Center, the deal between the two companies
would not be compatible with the terms of the forthcoming GPL (GNU
General Public License) version 3, and it might not be compatible with
the current version. All versions of the GPL require that anyone who
ghts is the right to redistribute the software. But if the patent
license Microsoft has granted to Novell customers only extends to
Novell customers, then Novell customers cannot redistribute the
software freely. According to Moglen, this may violate the terms of
the license. As it turns out, this possibility was not lost on Novell,
either. In a press release issued Tuesday, Novell made its case for
compatibility with the open source license: "Many people want to know
whether this agreement is compatible with Novell's obligations under
the GPL, especially section 7... Our agreement does not affect the
freedom that Novell or anyone else in the open source community,
including developers, has under the GPL and does not impose any
condition that would contradict the conditions of the GPL. Therefore,
the agreement is fully compliant with the GPL." Vnunet.com reports
that Moglen has been granted permission to conduct a confidential audit
to determine whether the Novell/Microsoft partnership is compatible
with the GPL, version 2. He says he's open to the possibility that
Novell has pulled it off, but adds, "They will not clear GPL3 by a
millimeter."
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