Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Thursday, 01 February 2007

A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS and Sponsor Members
Edited by Robin Cover

This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by:
BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com

Headlines

IBM Research Projects Cover SOA, Web 2.0
W3C Issues Last Call Working Draft for mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0
OASIS WS-SX Technical Committee Issues Specifications for Adoption as OASIS Standards
Zend Seeks A Sustainable Open-Source Model
Sun Announces Multi-Language Support for NetBeans IDE Version 5.5
SOA Solutions Provider Active Endpoints To Support WS-BPEL 2.0
How Many Contradictions Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?

IBM Research Projects Cover SOA, Web 2.0
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

IBM showed off research efforts in a number of areas, including SOA, wikis, and mashups, at its IBM Silicon Valley Lab on Wednesday afternoon. Technologies on display leveraged concepts like social networking, collaboration, and Web 2.0. Security and healthcare systems also were on display. The 26 projects viewed were in various stages of development, ranging from incubation to actual availability. In the SOA area, IBM's Request Driven Provisioning technology provides a framework to offer business services in an SOA. It combines automated systems with business processes for the purpose of end-to-end IT service delivery. Services are provisioned based on user requirements, said Willy Chiu, IBM vice president for High Performance On Demand Solutions in the company's Software Group. "What we're doing is allowing a business unit to define its requirements for a complete SOA system that would have taken months to install and now it takes hours," said Chiu. The technology is available as a service offering that leverages IBM's WebSphere, Tivoli, Rational, and other product lines. DB2 provides for data storage. Also in SOA, IBM touted Sonoma, which is a Web-based capacity planning tool. To be offered through a Saas (Software as a Service) model, it will enable customers to size SOA-based workloads to meet future performance and scalability requirements. Sonoma is the latest version of the company's OPERA (On Demand Performance Advisor) tool for capacity planning. Projects demonstrated under the umbrella of social networking, collaboration, and Web 2.0 included: (1) Information Factory, a portal-based system for organizing feedback from customers. Wikis, blogs, social networking, and tagging tools are used to accelerate collaboration. (2) Koala, a social engineering effort allowing non-programmers to easily automate processes on the Web in a collaborative environment using wiki-like collaborative authoring and semantic Web annotation. Reusable procedures can be developed and reused by recording keystrokes and clicks as a user completes a task. (3) Fringe, transforming IBM's internal directory into a corporate social networking site. Activities and relationships can be organized around people and experiments with the application of social networking and tagging principles. (4) QEDwiki (quick and easily done wiki), an enterprise mashup tool that makes it easy for non-technical persons to build Web-based applications that blend company data with outside Web services. (5) Mashups for the Enterprise, which are applications developed to solve a situational business problem by integrating Internet/intranet data and services using lightweight Web 2.0 technologies.

W3C Issues Last Call Working Draft for mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0
Sean Owen and Jo Rabin (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group has announced the release of a Last Call Working Draft for the "W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0" specification. The document includes a set of editors notes on which feedback would be appreciated, in particular on the UTF-8 requirement. The Working Group would also like feedback from Web content developers on the perceived difficulty of getting the mobileOK Basic status as described in this document. Comments are welcome through 6-March-2007. While becoming increasingly popular, mobile Web access today still suffers from interoperability and usability problems. W3C's Mobile Web Initiative (W3C MWI) addresses these issues through a concerted effort of key players in the mobile production chain, including authoring tool vendors, content providers, handset manufacturers, browser vendors and mobile operators. The "W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0" document defines the tests that provide the basis for making a claim of W3C mobileOK Basic conformance and are based on W3C Mobile Web Best Practices. Content which passes the tests has taken some steps to provide a functional user experience for users of basic mobile devices whose capabilities at least match those of the Default Delivery Context (DDC). mobileOK Basic is the lesser of two levels of claim, the greater level being mobileOK, described separately. Claims to be W3C mobileOK Basic compliant are represented using content labels, also described separately. mobileOK assesses interoperability. It does not measure usability and does not address the important goal of assessing whether users of more advanced devices enjoy a richer user experience than is possible using the DDC.

See also: the Mobile Web Initiative

OASIS WS-SX Technical Committee Issues Specifications for Adoption as OASIS Standards
Staff, OASIS Announcement

The OASIS Web Services Secure Exchange (WS-SX) Technical Committee has submitted a "WS-Trust 1.3" and "WS-SecureConversation 1.3" specification set for consideration as an OASIS Standard. The WS-SX TC was chartered to define extensions to OASIS Web Services Security to enable trusted SOAP message exchanges involving multiple message exchanges and to define security policies that govern the formats and tokens of such messages. This work has been carried out through continued refinement of the Web Services SecureConversation, SecurityPolicy and Trust specifications submitted to the TC. The "WS-Trust" specification uses the base mechanisms of WS-Security and defines additional primitives and extensions for security token exchange to enable the issuance and dissemination of credentials within different trust domains. Specifically, WS-Trust provides methods for issuing, renewing, and validating security tokens and ways to establish assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships. The "WS-SecureConversation" specification defines extensions to allow security context establishment and sharing, and session key derivation. This allows contexts to be established and potentially more efficient keys or new key material to be exchanged, thereby increasing the overall performance and security of the subsequent exchanges. The security context is defined as a new WS-Security token type that is obtained using a binding of WS-Trust.

Zend Seeks A Sustainable Open-Source Model
Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com

Open-source software company Zend Technologies, hoping to double its revenue this year, says it will narrow its focus to big business and Web 2.0-style start-ups, according to incoming CEO Harold Goldberg. Venture-backed Zend makes development tools for running Web applications written with PHP, an open-source scripting language. As it seeks to grow beyond its current size—with annual revenue between $10 million and $30 million—Goldberg said he intends to focus the company on a handful of growth initiatives, down from eight or nine now. He said the obvious routes are doubling efforts to sell to corporations and governments, particularly in Europe, where open-source applications and standards are gaining favor. Because PHP is used in millions of Web sites, so-called Web 2.0 start-ups are another potential focus for company sales. The company is also filling out its product line, which includes development tools and software for running PHP applications. This month, it intends to release Zend Core, a certified version of the PHP language that includes software to optimize PHP applications to work with Oracle and IBM databases, as well as Microsoft's Windows. With the business software industry consolidated around a handful of very large companies, many companies formed over the past five years have bet on free products and open-source business models to undercut the giants.

See also: the company web site

Sun Announces Multi-Language Support for NetBeans IDE Version 5.5
Staff, Sun Microsystems Announcement

Sun Microsystems has announced the availability of the NetBeans 5.5 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese and Traditional Chinese. In addition, the NetBeans Translation Project has received numerous other language contributions including: Albanian, Azerbaijani, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. A number of these language translations are the result of interest from Java User Groups around the world. The recent release of the NetBeans 5.5 IDE in Brazilian Portuguese is a testament to the efforts of NetBeans community members and Java technology developers who collaborated through the NetBeans Translation Project to help localize the IDE for their fellow developers. Michel Graciano, a software developer of KSI Solucoes em Informatica and member of SouJava, a large Brazilian Java User Group, was the project lead for the Brazilian Portuguese translation. NetBeans 5.5 IDE in Traditional Chinese was done completely by Chin-Lung (James) Yu of Taiwan, who is currently a PhD student in the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA The NetBeans IDE is a free, open-source Integrated Development Environment for software developers. The IDE runs on many platforms including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and the MacOS. It is easy to install and use straight out of the box. The NetBeans IDE provides developers with all the tools they need to create professional cross-platform desktop, enterprise, web and mobile applications. NetBeans IDE 5.5 builds on the success of NetBeans 5.0 and adds support for Java EE 5 and Sun Java System Application Server PE 9. Got Web 2.0? Of course! NetBeans 5.5 generates JAX-WS 2.0 artifacts for Java SE 6 and Java EE 5 projects. The NetBeans Enterprise Pack provides support for creating Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications, including XML schema tools, a WSDL editor, and a BPEL editor for web services orchestration.

SOA Solutions Provider Active Endpoints To Support WS-BPEL 2.0
Staff, SOAWorld Magazine News Desk

Active Endpoints, provider of SOA orchestration products and services, announced the availability of ActiveBPEL 3.0. The ActiveBPEL product family includes open source and commercial SOA orchestration solutions that are standards-compliant and platform-neutral, forming the foundation for fast, cost-effective business and systems integration. Among other important capabilities, ActiveBPEL 3.0 comprehensively supports the forthcoming WS-BPEL 2.0 standard, which will be officially published early in 2007. ActiveBPEL 3.0 allows SOA application developers and ISVs to leverage the power of the BPEL 2.0 standard while preserving prior investments in BPEL 1.1 processes. ActiveBPEL 3.0's pluggable architecture complements all SOA IT infrastructures and offers an independent, best-in-class solution for building, testing, deploying and managing BPEL-based applications. Enterprise developers and systems integrators use ActiveBPEL to significantly reduce the time and complexity of implementing SOA applications, from proof of concept to deployment. A large and growing group of businesses now use ActiveBPEL in demanding environments across financial services, government, telecommunications, and other industries. ActiveBPEL is also the embedded, best-in-class BPEL solution for many leading software providers who look to Active Endpoints for competitive advantages when including BPEL in their own products. In response to input from hundreds of customers and partners, ActiveBPEL 3.0 offers new capabilities including: (1) Support for all WS-BPEL 2.0 process constructs and semantics; (2) Automatic migration of BPEL4WS 1.1 processes to the new WS-BPEL 2.0 standard, preserving users' investments in existing 1.1 processes; (3) Seamless, side-by-side execution of BPEL4WS 1.1 and WS-BPEL 2.0 processes, allowing phased migration to WS-BPEL 2.0; (4) Enhanced message routing based on WS-Addressing to streamline and improve the execution of long running processes; (5) Policy-driven message exchanges based on WS-ReliableMessaging; (6) BPEL Sub-process execution, allowing process components to be executed within the lifecycle of their invoking processes.

See also: the OASIS TC

How Many Contradictions Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?
Andy Updegrove, ConsortiumInfo.org Blog

As those who are following Microsoft's OOXML formats through the standardization process will know, those formats (now officially known as Ecma 376, following the favorable adoption vote in Ecma on December 7 of last year) are now in the "contradiction" phase in JTC 1 at ISO/IEC. Or, so it would seem, they are in the "so, what is a contradiction, anyway?" phase. Microsoft has won the first point in this match (on which more below), as national bodies around the world wrestle with this question. The question of what a "contradiction" may be under the ISO/IEC rules is of more than passing interest. On the most basic level, the question is legitimate, since ISO/IEC apparently do not supply a precise definition, even though one out of the six months in the ISO/IEC Fast Track process is allocated to the submission of contradictions by the 60-odd Principal and Observer members of these global standards organizations that are entitled to respond during this phase. Yesterday, I learned that the Executive Board of INCITS decided earlier in the day not to propose to ANSI that any contradictions need be identified between OOXML and any ISO/IEC standards, Directives or other rules. The reason is that Microsoft, which has a member on the committee, has persuaded a sufficient number of members of the INCITS Executive Board to adopt a very conservative definition for a "contradiction."

See also: Brian Jones


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