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XML and Web Services In The News - 28 November 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by IBM Corporation
HEADLINES:
Intalio Donates BPMN Technology to Eclipse
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
Intalio, which prides itself as "The Open Source BPMS (Business Process
Management System) Company," announced that it has donated its BPMN
(Business Process Modeling Notation) process modeler to the Eclipse
Foundation, and the technology is now available under the Eclipse
Public License and is part of the Eclipse STP (SOA Tools Platform)
project. Intalio officials said the STP BPMN modeler is one of three
contributions the company has made to build the first open-source BPMS.
It complements the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) engine
Intalio donated to the Apache Software Foundation and the Tempo
BPEL4People workflow framework hosted on Intalio.org. All three
components form the foundation for Intalio BPMS, a BPM solution that
supports a Zero-Code development model. According to Ismael Ghalimi,
founder and CEO of Intalio, the building blocks for Intalio-BPMS provide
faithful implementations of relevant industry standards for BPM, namely
BPMN, BPEL and BPEL4People. "This is part of our mission to make BPM
available to a mainstream audience, and today's donation is yet another
step toward this goal."
See also: the announcement
Choose RELAX Now
Tim Bray, Ongoing Blog
Elliotte Rusty Harold's RELAX [RELAX-NG] Wins may be a milestone in
the life of XML. Everybody who actually touches the technology has
known the truth for years, and it's time to stop sweeping it under the
rug. W3C XML Schemas (XSD) [...] are hard to read, hard to write, hard
to understand, have interoperability problems, and are unable to
describe lots of things you want to do all the time in XML. Schemas
based on Relax NG, also known as ISO Standard 19757, are easy to write,
easy to read, are backed by a rigorous formalism for interoperability,
and can describe immensely more different XML constructs. To Elliotte's
list of important XML applications that are RELAX-based, I'd add the
Atom Syndication Format and, pretty soon now, the Atom Publishing
Protocol. It's a pity; when XSD came out people thought that since it
came from the W3C, same as XML, it must be the way to go, and it got
baked into a bunch of other technology before anyone really had a
chance to think it over. So now lots of people say "Well, yeah [...]
but we're stuck with it." Wrong! The time has come to declare it a
worthy but failed experiment, tear down the shaky towers with XSD in
their foundation, and start using RELAX for all significant XML work.
[Note: among the XML-DEV thread messages, several writers noted that
it's not a "W3C vs NOT-W3C thing. Jonathan Robie wrote: "[one] naive
theme is that the W3C is some kind of monopolistic force that can, or
tries to, force everyone to use every W3C standard. Standards have to
succeed in the open market, and the W3C has developed both successful
and unsuccessful standards. Being a W3C standard is enough to get
noticed, but not enough to ensure adoption. Which is good. The second
naive theme is that technical superiority ensures customer demand. W3C
XML Schema has the advantage that it is supported by most XML tools;
RELAX-NG does not. I prefer RELAX-NG, but at the companies I have
worked for, there has never been real customer demand for it."
See also: the XML-DEV thread
Is Novell-Microsoft Patent Deal Headed for Re-Write?
Sean Michael Kerner, InternetNews.com
Nearly three weeks after Novell's deal with Microsoft over patents,
Novell developers are saying that one key part of the agreement is not
enough: developers said they are leery of phrasing about legal
protections; they are now working with Microsoft on some improvements.
The deal is filled with legalese about how Novell and Microsoft
products can interoperate. It includes an "individual non-commercial"
covenant that is supposed to provide developers a degree of protection
from potential litigation by Microsoft over intellectual property
infringement. Nat Friedman, Novell's chief technology and strategy
officer for open source: "Personally I think it falls very short of
the mark; I don't think it covers enough people or enough activities."
Friedman said discussions are underway with Microsoft to make at least
one critical change related to the promise not to sue individual
developers. As a result of the Microsoft deal, Novell will receive
millions of dollars from Microsoft, some of which may well be re-
invested in Novell's open source efforts. OpenSUSE developers were
keen to know if that money would go to them and whether it means more
paid engineers will join the OpenSUSE project. OpenSUSE developer
Andreas Jaeger said he feared it won't mean higher salaries for
existing developers. But Friedman argued that there will be benefits
to the open source community as a whole from the Microsoft deal. He
said that includes adding Open XML support to OpenOffice, building a
virtualization enhancement to run Novell's flagship SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server (SLES) on Microsoft's next Virtual Server release,
and Vista on Xen. "We'll also be working together on WS-Management,"
a Web services specification written by Microsoft, Intel, Sun and
others, he added. WS-Management lays out a common way for disparate
systems to exchange and access management information across the
infrastructure. "All this code will be released open source so
everyone gets that, and can benefit from it." Though Novell and
Microsoft will collaborate on interoperability, Microsoft's patented
intellectual property will not be added into Novell's open source
contributions.
Opera Introduces New Version of Mini Web Browser
David Garrett, CIO Today
Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox might vie for
dominion in desktop browsing, but Opera, makers of an eponymous browser
that comes in desktop, smartphone, and cell phone versions, wants to
control the mobile space. On Tuesday, the Norwegian firm released
version 3.0 of Opera Mini, a Web browser for mobile phones. Among its
claims to fame is a feature that lets bloggers and users of social-
networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and MySpace quickly upload
photos from their phone's on-board camera. Opera Mini will launch the
camera, let users snap a photo, then send it to the site in question.
The new Mini includes several other tools that hyperconnected users
might like. Among these are a built-in RSS reader to grab news, blogs,
and syndicated content, and a "content folding" feature in which the
browser rolls up long menus into a single button that users can expand
at will, making it simpler to view Web sites on a cell phone's tiny
screen. The new version of Opera Mini also boasts enhanced security
Relevant Products/Services for shopping, banking, and Web mail. Like
prior versions, it includes Opera's data-compression feature, which
filters Web sites through Opera's servers to condense them, making
them download more quickly. Tips for developers to ensure Opera Mini
compatibility [include] "Develop sites according to open Web standards.
To validate your webpage, right-click with your mouse on the page
using the Opera desktop browser [or use the W3C online Validator]."
See also: the announcement
Google's Ambitions Going Mobile
Marguerite Reardon, CNET News.com
Deep Nishar, Google's director of product management, sees mobility as
the next new frontier of the Internet. For the past year Google been
focusing its attention on the mobile market. The company has steadily
introduced new services designed specifically for the small screen. In
January, it released the Google Personalized Home, which lets people
access Gmail, news, RSS feeds and other information from their
personalized Google home page on mobile phones and PDAs. The service is
free in the U.S. and works with any phone that contains an XHTML-capable
Web browser. This summer it launched a downloadable Java application
for Google Maps, enabling cell phone users to get information about
local restaurants and movies theaters as well as live traffic
information on the map. And this month, it improved its mobile Gmail
client to allow quicker access to the application. At the same time,
Google has been busy developing partnerships with mobile operators,
such as Sprint Nextel and Cingular Wireless. It's also been testing
new business models, like text-based mobile advertising, and more
localized advertising. With nearly 3 billion mobile phone subscribers
in the world expected by the end of 2007, Google sees great potential
for extending its presence throughout the world using the mobile
platform. Deep Nishar: " We are focusing on location-based services:
people take their cell phones with them everywhere, and they generally
are looking for information in the context of a location. With Google
Maps, we can show you the location of the nearest movie theater, the
times of the shows, and even let you purchase tickets from your phone.
Given that our mission is to organize the world's information, it's
important to make sure our applications work everywhere in the world.
The next step is to interact with advanced cell phone technology, like
Global Positioning Systems or GPS, so that the device knows where you
are. We're already doing that with Helio's new phones. The whole point
is to make the user's life simpler.
Web 2.0: Ingredients For A Site Makeover
David Strom, InformationWeek
Web 2.0, The Long Tail, social networking, tagging, Ajax — so many
new catch phrases, but so little time to understand their value. "The
'Web 2.0' label means little and is being used by unscrupulous marketers
to dress up all sorts of vaguely-Web-related technologies," Tim Bray,
director of Web Technologies for Sun Microsystems, said. "The right
question to ask is: 'What will it do for ME?'" Above all, as Matsuoka
noted, you should, "embrace the Web as a new application interface with
its own unique characteristics. Don't try to replicate desktop
interfaces or printed brochures." The best advice is to deploy Ajax
slowly. Ajax is more a collection of technologies that let a developer
build interactive Web applications rather than any single one piece of
code. Ajax combines several programming tools and interfaces including
JavaScript, dynamic HTML (DHTML), Extensible Markup Language (XML),
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and the Document Object Model (DOM). That
collection of tools can help bring about cost reductions and functional
improvements. If you don't have the in-house staff and skills to deal
with all this technology alphabet soup, pick your battles carefully. If
you have to finger one critical component in Ajax, then start with CSS
or RSS. RSS is also useful in keeping people current with a fast-changing
site, such as for discussion threads, tracking price changes and other,
quickly moving, situations. Once you are finished coding, remember to
check your work with any number of tools that are just a download away.
"Fortunately, there are many validation and QA tools freely available
on the Internet," said Bray. "Most notably, the W3C's HTML and CSS
validators, and since anything Web 2.0-ish is going to have syndication
feeds..."
See also: the Atom/RSS FEED Validator
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