Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Tuesday, 27 March 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

Oracle Joins Linux Patent Commons
OASIS Approves New Web Services Security Standards
Last Call Review for Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 2.0
ODF Group A Year Old, But Format Still Unproven
Using Axis2 and JiBX: Turn XML Into a Fully Functional Web Service
BEA Delivers Web 2.0 Enteprise Tools
O'Reilly Book Notice: Schematron

Oracle Joins Linux Patent Commons
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Linux-Watch

Oracle and the Open Invention Network (OIN) announced that Oracle will become an OIN licensee. By doing this, Oracle opens the doors to making some of its patents available royalty-free to any company, institution, or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against Linux. OIN members—which currently include IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony—agree to assign software patents that might affect Linux to the OIN. These patents can then be used by anyone in Linux without having to pay any royalty fees or having to worry about future law suits. In late 2006, Oracle began offering its own "Unbreakable Linux" distribution, a Red Hat Linux clone. Since the OIN was founded in November 2005, the organization has accumulated more than 100 strategic, worldwide patents and patent applications, it says. These patents are available to all licensees as part of the patent commons that OIN is creating around, and in support of, Linux. According to the OIN, this patent commons makes it economically attractive for companies that want to repackage, embed, and use Linux to host specialized services or create complementary products. Patent cross-licensing agreements aren't new. Oracle appearing to grant an automatic patent license to any Linux developer that agrees to abide by OIN's rules, however, is new.

See also: the announcement

OASIS Approves New Web Services Security Standards
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems (OASIS) has announced that its members have approved WS-SecureConversation version 1.3 and WS-Trust version 1.3 as OASIS Standards. The specifications were developed by the OASIS WS-SX (Web Services Secure Exchange) Technical Committee, and they define policies and extensions to WS-Security that enable the trusted exchange of multiple SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) messages. WS-Trust provides methods for issuing, renewing and validating security tokens as well as establishing, detecting and brokering trust relationships, OASIS officials said. Meanwhile, WS-SecureConversation allows security contexts to be created and key material to be exchanged more efficiently, OASIS said. Together the standards can improve the performance and security of exchanges. Anne Thomas Manes, research director with the Burton Group: "In order to secure communication between two parties, both must exchange security credentials. Before that can take place though, each party needs to determine if they can 'trust' the asserted credentials of the other. Applications that communicate using the Web services framework (e.g., SOAP and WSDL) can use WS-Trust to obtain and exchange security credentials—either directly or through a trusted third party—and use WS-SecureConversation to establish and maintain an extended secure session." IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems have verified successful implementations of WS-SecureConversation and WS-Trust, in accordance with eligibility requirements for all OASIS Standards. Representatives of Adobe, AmberPoint, Axway, BEA Systems, BMC Software, CA, EDS, Forum Systems, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, IONA, Microsoft, Neustar, Nokia, Nortel, Novell, Oracle, Progress Software, Red Hat, Ricoh, SAP, SOA Software, Software AG, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO Software, VeriSign, and other members of OASIS collaborated to develop WS-SecureConversation and WS-Trust.

See also: the announcement

Last Call Review for Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 2.0
David Booth, Canyang Kevin Liu (et al., eds), W3C Technical Reports

W3C's Web Services Description Working Group has released three Last Call Working Drafts for the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0. "Part 0: Primer" serves as a companion to the WSDL 2.0 specification: "Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 1: Core Language" and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 2: Adjuncts. Comments are welcome through 15-April-2007 on this brief Last Call for changes since Candidate Recommendation review. WSDL 2.0 provides a model and an XML format for describing Web services. WSDL 2.0 enables one to separate the description of the abstract functionality offered by a service from concrete details of a service description such as how and where that functionality is offered. The specification defines a language for describing the abstract functionality of a service as well as a framework for describing the concrete details of a service description. It also defines the conformance criteria for documents in this language. In Part 1 Core, the namespace of the language specified in the document, and identifiers within it, have changed to a shorter, undated form: "http://www.w3.org/ns/wsdl", "http://www.w3.org/ns/wsdl-instance", "http://www.w3.org/ns/wsdl-extensions". "Part 2: Adjuncts" specifies predefined extensions for use in WSDL 2.0, including Message exchange patterns, Operation safety, Operation styles, and Binding extensions for SOAP and HTTP. "WSDL RDF Mapping" has been issued in updated Working Draft format: it provides a model and an XML format for describing Web services, and describes a representation of that model in the Resource Description Language (RDF) and in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and a mapping procedure for transforming particular WSDL descriptions into their RDF form. "SOAP 1.1 Binding" has also been updated.

See also: the W3C news item

ODF Group A Year Old, But Format Still Unproven
Elizabeth Montalbano, InfoWorld

Tuesday marks the one-year anniversary of the ODF Alliance, an international group of organizations dedicated to promoting ODF (Open Document format for XML) as an international standard for document formats. But while the group has encouraged public agencies across the world to enact policies to support open IT standards over the last year, ODF supporters have more work to do to increase the adoption of alternatives to Microsoft's Office suite, industry watchers said. In the past year, the alliance—which counts IBM and Sun as members—has helped ODF gain momentum in government agencies across the world and even in the U.S., which has been traditionally resistant to replacing Microsoft software with open alternatives. The latest win for the technology was on Tuesday when Oregon legislators joined government officials in Texas, California, and Minnesota in proposing bills that would make it mandatory for the state's government agencies to base their technologies on open standards like ODF. Also in the past year, the national governments of Belgium, Brazil, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway have recommended ODF or open standards for government documents like legislation and policy statements, and several regional governments have also said they are eyeing the standard for use as the default file format for documents, said Marino Marcich, the ODF Alliance's executive director. While the alliance has been a strong promoter of ODF and thus a catalyst for much of this support, another event has paved the way for broader adoption of ODF: its approval last May as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization. Microsoft's rival Open XML format—the default in Office 2007—is currently awaiting standardization from the same group. The ODF Alliance, which had 36 member organizations at its launch, now includes more than 370 members from 51 countries.

See also: ODF references

Using Axis2 and JiBX: Turn XML Into a Fully Functional Web Service
Tyler Anderson, IBM developerWorks

Apache Axis2 provides several XML solutions to make Web services development easier and more powerful. Axis2 is an excellent choice for implementing Web services, and the Apache Axis2 and Apache Geronimo duo, both free and open source, make them a viable option to consider. This article, the second part in a series, uses Axis2 and JiBX to go from XML to a fully functional Web service from existing Java classes. The previous part of this series introduced the Java classes used to expose the classes as Web services through WSDL, and then made a JiBX definition description that communicate with the JiBX data bindings in order to test a Web service. In this test process, you compile the JiBX binding classes to create wrapper classes, making your data bindings classes a functional part of the overall Web service.

See also: Part 1

BEA Delivers Web 2.0 Enteprise Tools
By Richard Karpinski, Network Computing

BEA has unveiled three products aimed at helping IT create and deliver enterprise-scale Web 2.0 and social-computing applications behind the corporate firewall. The three products—BEA AquaLogic Pages, BEA AquaLogic Ensemble and BEA AquaLogic Pathways—let companies produce social applications while giving IT full control to manage end-user participation and access to corporate data, BEA said. Social computing and Web 2.0 is all the rage these days, but enterprises must weigh the value of increased interaction against the need to secure enterprise data and applications. BEA's AquaLogic Ensemble (formerly called Project Runner) is infrastructure software for developers and IT operations that lets them make and manage enterprise mash-up applications. Mash-ups take data from various sources, both public and behind-the-firewall, and bring them together to create new applications. AquaLogic Pages (formerly Project Builder) is designed to let end users access and expose enterprise data and create simple Web applications for day-to-day business use. AquaLogic Pathways (formerly Project Graffiti) is a collaboration tool that combines social book-marking and tagging with search and activity analytics. It is designed to help users within an enterprise discover relevant information—and to help others discover it as well.

See also: the announcement

O'Reilly Book Notice: Schematron

Eric van der Vlist Schematron is a rule-based XML schema language, offering flexibility and power that W3C XML schema, RELAX NG, and DTDs simply can't match. You need Schematron and can't settle for other languages if you have to check rules that go beyond checking the document structures (i.e., checking that an element bar is included in element foo) and their datatypes. Schematron is the right tool for checking conditions such as "startDate is earlier than or equal to endDate." Schematron is also the right tool to use if you have to raise user-friendly error messages rather than depend on error messages that are generated by a schema processor and that are often obscure. Schematron builds on XPath. You will need to understand XPath to to get the most from Schematron.

See also: Schematron references


SEARCH \| ABOUT \| INDEX \| NEWS \| CORE STANDARDS \| TECHNOLOGY REPORTS \| EVENTS \| LIBRARY

Headlines

Sponsors