Cover Pages: Cover Pages News Clippings 2002-11

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[November 27, 2002] Updated IBM Web Services Tool Kit (WSTK) Version 3.3. IBM alphaWorks has updated its Web Services Toolkit. Version 3.3 of the Toolkit now features support for Tivoli Management Web Services and Common Event Format, a Federated Identity demo, a Wide Spectrum Stress Tool, Reputation Protocol, WS-Inspection crawler utility, Pluggable Discovery Framework, Privacy Authorization Director, and an Updated Utility Services. An installed image of the WSTK 3.3 is now running on developerWorks. This version contains all of the WSTK 3.3 documentation and a selected subset of demos that can be run without downloading anything. The Web Services Tool Kit (WSTK) for dynamic e-business is a software development kit that includes demos and examples to aid in designing and executing Web service applications that can automatically find one another and collaborate in business transactions without additional programming or human intervention. Simple examples of Web services are provided, as well as demonstrations of how some of the emerging technology standards, such as SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL, work together. WSTK showcases emerging technology in Web services and is a good way to get an understanding of the most recently announced Web services specifications. However, for a product-level development environment for Web services, IBM's WebSphere Studio Application Developer is recommended. It allows creation, building, testing, publishing, and discovering of Web service-based applications that support UDDI, SOAP, WSDL, and XML." See related discussion in: (1) "Web Services Toolkit: IBM developerWorks Web Services Demos"; (2) "IBM Web Services ToolKit: A Showcase For Emerging Web Services Technologies," by John Feller; (3) "Explore the Web Services Bus, Part 1 -- Using a UDDI-Based Discovery Mechanism to Make Publishing and Discovering Web Services a Breeze," by Greg Flurry; Greg discusses the Web Services Bus, a framework for constructing Web services processors.
[November 26, 2002] jEdit Plugin for RenderX XSL Formatter XEP. A posting from David Tolpin announces the availability of a jEdit plugin for RenderX XSL Formatter XEP. jEdit is a programmer's text editor written in Java. The jEdit plugin is available as a free component to all licensed users of RenderX XEP. The XEP Rendering Engine from RenderX is an XSL processor: it takes layout data represented in XSL -- either as a standalone XSL Formatting Objects document, or an arbitrary XML document coupled with an XSL stylesheet. "The XEP Rendering Engine converts XML documents to a printable form (PDF or PostScript) by applying XSL styling. It is written in Java, and supports industry-standard programming interfaces for XML processing. Several editions, different in features and price, cover a broad range of possible applications -- from occasional desktop usage to a heavy --loaded server component; there is also a free trial version. RenderX XEP jEdit plugin requires XEP version 3.1 or higher (the current version is 3.13) and jEdit version 4.0 or higher." XEP users can download the jEdit plugin from the RenderX XEP Updates & Extras page. A XEP Connector for XML Spy is also available as a free add-on for users of Client, Developer, and Server versions of XEP 3.x. For related software, see "XSL/XSLT Software Support."
[November 26, 2002] TEI Meets RelaxNG, MathML, SVG, W3C Schema. A posting from Sebastian Rahtz (Oxford University Computing Services Information Manager) announces updated Relax NG Schemas for the TEI. "There are RelaxNG schemas for MathML and SVG and a demonstration of how to include them in a TEI Relax NG schema and document. I have devised a crude way to 'flatten' a Relax NG schema to remove inclusions and redundant definitions, yielding a single portable file with no dependencies. For each of my example TEI Schemas, I have used James Clark's trang program to generate a W3C Schema (.xsd schema file). The next stage in this exercise will be to rewrite the TEI "pizzachef" tool to work with the RelaxNG version of the TEI, and generate DTD Relax and W3C constraints according to the users specifications. Comments on any of the above very welcome... The distribution contains 64 .rng RELAX-NG schema files; see the file list. [The relevant directory] contains a set of Relax NG Schema specifications corresponding to TEI P4. They were created automatically from the ODDs source of the TEI, and are kept in sync; you can download all the .rng files in a zip file." See: (1) "Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) - XML for TEI Lite"; (2) "RELAX NG." [cache]
[November 26, 2002] IBM alphaWorks Releases XML Processing Plus Plus. IBM alphaWorks labs has made XML Processing Plus Plus available for downoad. XML Processing Plus Plus "is a typed and stream-based XML processing language. It extends the Java language with unique XML-processing functionality. This language provides simple XML stream APIs and the powerful type-checking facility. The XML Processing Plus Plus language provides new XML stream APIs: XmlIn and XmlOut. XmlIn is used for retrieving data from XML input streams, and XmlOut is used for inserting data to XML output streams. XML Processing Plus Plus includes the xpppc compiler, which converts programs written in XML Processing Plus Plus syntax into Java codes that use standard XML APIs. The compiler supports type checking based on DTDs (Document Type Definitions). The type checker reports semantic errors of XML manipulation against DTDs and helps detect problems at early stages of application development." From the FAQ document: "There are two major models for XML processing: the object model and stream model. W3C DOM reflects the object model, which uses tree structures to represent XML documents. On the other hand, SAX is stream-based, which processes an XML document as if it is not a tree but a single line of tokens. XML Processing Plus Plus adopts the stream-based model. In stream-based processing, documents are processed in the pre-order of appearance of each element (often called the document order in the XML community)... Since the processing order is fixed, we do not have to specify which way to move as we should in DOM-based XML processing. Note also that when running the compiled program, stream-based APIs guarantee a better performance..." The tool has been developed by Akihiko Tozawa, an IBM researcher in the Internet Technology Department at Tokyo Research Lab., IBM Japan LTD.
[November 26, 2002] HP Hires Computer Pioneer Alan Kay. An eWEEK article reports that "Computer pioneer Alan Kay is joining Hewlett-Packard Co. as a senior fellow in HP Labs focusing on the development of new software platforms. Kay, who gave the industry the widely-quoted comment, 'The best way to predict the future is to invent it,' will work at HP developing new software platforms based on open-source code for devices and distributed applications, according to the Palo Alto, Calif., company. 'Alan's interests coincide perfectly with our efforts to create a new software platform for the 21st century,' Patrick Scaglia, vice president for HP Labs' Internet and Computing Platform Technologies group, said in a statement. 'I agree with HP on the need to support standards-based, modular systems, where it makes sense for users and the industry,' Kay said in a statement. Over the past three-plus decades, Kay has been a key figure in the development of such technology as the laptop and Smalltalk, the first complete object-oriented language. A founder of Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center, Kay also was instrumental in the development of such technology as overlapping windows on computer screens, icons and point-and-click interfaces..." See also the HP announcement.
[November 22, 2002] RELAX NG Compact Syntax Utilities. On 2002-11-22 David Rosenborg (Pantor Engineering AB) announced the availability of "RELAX NG Compact Syntax Utilities." From XML-DEV: "I have made three utilities for the RELAX NG Compact Syntax available for public use: (1) an Emacs mode for editing in the compact syntax [minor emacs mode; just a beta; the indentation function needs some improvement]; (2) RngToRnc.xsl: an XSLT stylesheet that transforms from the XML syntax to the compact syntax; (3) RncReader: a SAX2 parser that reads a compact syntax schema and sends events to the application as if it was reading a schema in the XML syntax. By using this package, it's easy to add compact syntax support to a Java application. The reader can also work as a simple command line converter; see the supplied readme.txt for details. The utilities are available for download under a BSD license. See the news item of 2002-11-21: "RELAX NG Compact Syntax Published as an OASIS Committee Specification."
[November 22, 2002] New Open XPath NG Mailing List. On 2002-11-20 Uche Ogbuji (Fourthought, Inc.) announced that he was setting up a "a public dance floor" (mailing list) for Open XPath NG. The Xpath-ng mailing list has been created "to discuss community advancements of XPath and related standards. XPath 1.0 is an enormously successful standard. Part of its success is its simplicity, but this simplicity also comes with limitations. The W3C is working on XPath 2.0, and there has been discussion of community work that provides alternative and/or complementary advancements of XPath. This mailing list is aimed at facilitating all such work. So come one, come all. I look forward to building useful things on top of XPath's success, and I hope this lists sets us in motion... It is no secret that there has been a lot of animosity expressed against the W#C efforts at furthering XPath. I hope this list becomes a focus for building things rather than tearing them down. I personally would like to join others to develop community XPath NG specs that may address different technical considerations than the W3C efforts, but I hope this list remains a nexus for discussion, proposals and (best of all) running code from all viewpoints..." Contributions to the list are archived.
[November 22, 2002] New Open Source Schematron Implemented for Java JAXP. A posting from Rick Jelliffe reports on a new Open Source Java implementation of Schematron 1.5. "This implementation will appeal to Java developers who want an uncomplicated implementation of Schematron, to be used with a JAXP-based XSLT engine, such as SAXON or XALAN. Phases are supported. Prepared by Eddie Robertsson, the code is now available at http://www.topologi.com/public/index.html. The distribution also includes support for embedded Schematron (in RELAX NG schemas, using James Clark's Jing package). This is Eddie's third implementation of a Schematron framework: he also wrote the VB implementation used by Topologi's Schematron Validator and the Java implementation used by Topologi's Collaborative Markup Editor." The Schematron is "a language and toolkit for making assertions about patterns found in XML documents. It can be used as a friendly validation language and for automatically generating external annotation (links, RDF, perhaps Topic Maps). Because it uses paths rather than grammars, it can be used to assert many constraints that cannot be expressed by DTDs or XML Schemas." Note: "The Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) supports processing of XML documents using DOM, SAX, and XSLT. JAXP enables applications to parse and transform XML documents independent of a particular XML processing implementation. Depending on the needs of the application, developers have the flexibility to swap between XML processors (such as high performance vs. memory conservative parsers) without making application code changes. Thus, application and tools developers can rapidly and easily XML-enable their Java applications for e-commerce, application integration, and dynamic Web publishing. Just added into the JAXP 1.2 reference implementation is support for XML schema and an XSLT compiler (XSLTC)." See "Schematron: XML Structure Validation Language Using Patterns in Trees."
[November 21, 2002] Online XML Schema Validator from DecisionSoft. Paul Warren posted a note describing the online DecisionSoft XML Schema Validator. This simple Schema Validator for W3C XML Schema "will take a single schema plus an instance document and list any errors found whilst validating the document against the schema. If you specify a schema file on the HTML form, it will use Xerces-J 2 for validation via the AS Builder class. If you do not supply a schema, it will use Xerces-J 1.4.3; it will fetch referenced schemas from the internet. This requires that the instance document specifies the location for the schema document using a schemaLocation attribute..." Description 2002-11-21. See other online validation tools referenced in "Validate/Check XML."
[November 14, 2002] Systinet Announces WASP 4.5 Beta Web Services Platform. Ian Bruce of Systinet Corporation announced the availability of the company's latest version of the "WASP product suite for building, deploying, securing and managing Web services. Systinet WASP 4.5 Beta includes unique security support, enhanced interoperability, and new management functionality. It is the only commercial product for creating both Java and C++ based Web services applications. WASP is free for development and test. WASP Server for C++, 4.5 Beta and WASP UDDI, 4.5 Beta are available immediately. WASP Server for Java, 4.5 Beta and WASP Developer, 4.5 Beta will be available in December... WASP Server for C++, 4.5 is the next version of our portable high-performance Web services platform. It builds upon the successful version 4.0 by adding important interoperability and security features... WASP UDDI is an industry-leading UDDI registry implementation. Version 4.5 builds upon the innovative features in WASP UDDI 4.0 by including support for the newly released UDDI V3 specification. Version 4.5 implements the most demanded UDDI V3 features and enhances the performance, scalability, and out-of-the-box experience. Support for UDDI V3 Notification and Subscription: Notification and subscription enable much more dynamic service discovery and publishing. Instead of polling for all potentially changed data inside the UDDI registry, applications can now subscribe to the registry to receive automatic notifications of which entries have changed. There are two basic ways how the subscription is used: asynchronous notification and synchronous pull subscription..."
[November 14, 2002] XML Thunder for COBOL. A posting from Asif Khan (Canam Software Labs, Inc.) announces the release of XML Thunder for COBOL. "XML Thunder is a visual XML designer and code generator specifically designed for creating XML data handling program code. Using XML Thunder, developers can easily create XML processing programs, called XML handlers. The visual designer allows the mapping of XML elements and attributes to COBOL program specific data structures. XML Thunder can be used to design and generate two distinct types of XML handling program code, XML Writers and XML Readers. An XML Writer is a subprogram that uses data passed to it to create an XML document and writes it to a data buffer. Conversely, an XML Reader is a subprogram that parses XML data passed to it in a buffer and populates the corresponding program data structures. The product is available for Microsoft Windows 98/NT/2000/XP development platforms and all target platforms supporting COBOL."
[November 12, 2002] Multimodal Browser Extension for MSIE. IBM alphaWorks has released a Multimodal Browser Extension that "enables Microsoft Internet Explorer to render multimodal applications written according to the W3C Acknowledged Submission, XHTML+Voice (X+V). This technology, which includes IBM's automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech engines, allows testing of voice-enabled Web applications written in the X+V language. The W3C has established a Multimodal Working Group to create a multimodal standard. IBM has submitted X+V to the W3C for consideration in addressing the requirements for a multimodal standard. X+V allows existing skills in VoiceXML development and Web development to be used to integrate multimodal technology into new or deployed Web applications. After installing the extension, multimodal applications can be opened in Internet Explorer. For voice-enabled fields, the Scroll Lock key can be used as the Push-to-Talk button. The browser can be used as a simulator and the application can be tested from the 'end user' perspective to resolve any remaining problems before deployment. The Multimodal Browser Extension requires Windows 2000 Professional or Server with Service Pack 2, or Windows XP; Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or above." See also: (1) the FAQ document, (2) IBM techexplorer, and (3) "IBM and Opera Software Team to Develop Multimodal Browser -- XHTML+Voice (X+V) Browser Allows Developers to Extend Voice, Web Applications," July 24, 2002.
[November 08, 2002] SchemaViewer 1.0 for W3C XML Schema Documents. Francis Kilkelly has announced the availability of a SchemaViewer 1.0 tool which "virtually eliminates tedious browsing of XML Schema documents by representing them as a easily navigatable hierarchical tree. The application is a Swing-based GUI. Features: (1) The tool allows you to quickly and easily browse the contents of any W3C-compliant XML Schema. (2) It displays any XML Schema as a hierarchical tree comprising of elements encountered within the schema/s. (3) If an element has 'type', 'ref' or 'base' attributes then the referenced element will appear as a child of the current element in the tree. (4) If the XML Schema has any import or include statements this tool will include the contents of the corresponding XML Schema. (5) This tool also allows you to view XML Schemas embedded within WSDL (Web Services Definition Language) documents." Requires Java Run-Time Environment 1.3.1 or higher. See related resources in W3C list of XML Schema tools and in "XML Schemas."
[November 07, 2002] IEEE MSE 2002 Track on Web Services and Multimedia. "IEEE Fourth International Symposium on Multimedia Software Engineering (MSE) is an international forum for multimedia and software engineering researchers to exchange information regarding advancements in the state of the art and practice of multimedia software engineering, as well as to identify the emerging research topics and define the future of multimedia. A special track is devoted to Web Services Multimedia. Web services are Internet-based, modular applications that perform a specific business task and conform to a particular technical format. The technical format ensures each of these self-contained business services is an application that will easily integrate with other services to create a complete business process. For Web Services architecture, XML plays a role of normalizing the exchange of business data among trading partners by providing cross-platform approach in the areas of data encoding and data formatting. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), built on XML, defines a simple way to package information for information exchange across system boundaries. Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Registries, on the other hand, allow programmable elements to be placed on Internet where others can access remotely. The typical usages of Web Services for multimedia are media content management, media streaming and interactive application development. With the advancement of wireless information appliances, Web Services interfaces provide a means to enable the content or service can be created once and accessed by multiple SOAP-enabled devices such as Wireless phones, Palm devices, set-top boxes as well as regular Web browsers. This special track at MSE 2002 is the first attempt to provide an opportunity for researchers and engineers to exchange ideas regarding Multimedia and emerging Web Services technology in the world." See the event listing.
[November 05, 2002] Updated CommonRules for Rule-Based Applications. CommonRules version 3.3 from IBM alphaWorks now offers "improved performance; faster processing speed due to a better fact-matching algorithm; a new object-mapping system; improved documentation; and additional built-in functions. CommonRules is a rule-based framework for developing rule-based applications with major emphasis on maximum separation of business logic and data, conflict handling, and interoperability of rules. It is a pure Java library, and it provides a platform that enables the rapid development of rule-based applications through its situated rule engine via dynamic and real-time connection with business objects. CommonRules can be integrated with existing applications at a specific point of interest, or it can be used to create applications composed only of rules. CommonRules uses a sematically-rich rule language called CLP (Courteous Logic Program) to enable direct conflict resolution through conditional mutual exclusion and prioritized override. It contains a set of APIs for efficient application integration, as well as data and function bindings. Also included is a prototype for rule interlingua, which is currently based on CLP; later, it will be based on RuleML (the proposed standard rule format) in order to enable interoperability of different rules... CommonRules provides innovative XML interoperability and prioritized conflict-handling capabilities. These modularly augment a wide variety of rule-based systems and programming mechanisms already available in the market. CommonRules 3.3 includes an API set for enhancing Java or non-Java applications. It also includes extensive documentation and example rule sets. Using CommonRules, a seller Web site or application can communicate in XML its business policy rules about pricing, promotions, customer service provisions for refunds and cancellation, ordering lead time, and other contractual terms and conditions, to a customer application or agent, even when the seller's rules are implemented using a different rule system (such as OPS5-style production rules) than that in which the buyer's rules are implemented (such as Prolog). The customer application or agent can then understand and assimilate those rules into its own business logic, and it can automatically execute those rules to make plans or decisions." See: (1) "Business Rules Markup Language (BRML)"; (2) "Rule Markup Language (RuleML)."
[November 04, 2002] Online XENI ebXML RegRep Hosting Service by KTNET. A posting from Chaemee Kim announces a XENI Registry/Repository compliant with ebXML RIM 2.1 and RS 2.1. "The XENI (eXtensible ENterprise Integration) Web Registry Client [XENI MSH v2.0] provides not just MSH library, but also adaptors for legacy integration and console based on ebXML MS v2.0. Supported Reg/Rep Classification Schemes include GXMLHub (Global XML Hub for GXML Hub's members), GXML (Global XML, the business document standard for XML and EDI community), UNSPSC, VCML (Value Chain Markup Language), and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)." For more information, see the download page and the FAQ. General references: "Electronic Business XML Initiative (ebXML)."
[November 04, 2002] Call for Papers: XML for E-Journals. A posting from Sheau-Hwang Chang, editor of OCLC Systems and Services Journal, invites paper submissions for a special OSS journal issue on "XML for E-Journals." OSS "is a refereed and quaterly publication with an international readership. The editors would like to invite potential authors to contribute articles related to XML for E-Journals for OSS Volume 19, Number 4. Dr. Judith Wusteman will be the editor for this special issue. The focus of the issue includes all aspects of the use of XML for ejournal production, dissemination, display and archiving such as (1) XML and e-journal archives, (2) XML for e-journal metadata and full article text, (3) XML and the journal production lifecycle, (4) the application of SVG, MathML, CML, etc to ejournals." Contact Sheau-Hwang Chang or Dr. Judith Wusteman by email.
[November 04, 2002] Architag XML Editor XRay Supports W3C XML Schema. A posting from Mae Ozkan [2002-11-01] reports that Architag's XML Editor XRay now supports XML Schema (XSD) with XRay version 2.0. "Full W3C XML Schema (also called XSD) support is built into version 2 of XRay. XSD schemas are automatically parsed according to the W3C specification to assure compliance. Then, a schema is available, using XML Namespaces, to validate other XML documents within XRay. The XRay editing engine offers a real-time validator. Parsing errors are shown in real time as you type your XML tags and content. The real-time editing functionality helps new users learn XML quickly because they get instant feedback. Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is fully supported in XRay 2.0. This includes all parts of WSDL documents, including intelligent parsing of schemas within the WSDL file. XRay has built-in XSLT processing that, like the XML engine, provides real-time transformation of XML structures, including HTML. There is also a built-in HTML viewer for quick development of XML-based Web pages..." See the screen shots. XRay 2.0 is available for free download from http://architag.com/xray.


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