Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Wednesday, 23 May 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:
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Headlines

Call for Papers: The International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications (RuleML-2007)
W3C/OpenAjax Alliance Workshop on Mobile Ajax
SOA and Enterprise Architecture, Part 2: Similarities and Differences
W3C Proposed Recommendation: Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 2.0
DKIM: Promising Antispam Technique Gets Nod from IETF
SaaS Meets SOA With Help from Salesforce
Microsoft Opens Up Its Identity Management E-Wallet

Call for Papers: The International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications (RuleML-2007)
Staff, RuleML Symposium Announcement

The International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications (RuleML-2007) will take place, October 25-26, 2007, in Orlando, Florida, co-located with The 10th International Business Rules Forum. RuleML-2007 is devoted to practical distributed rule technologies and rule-based applications which need language standards for rules operating in the context of, e.g., the Semantic Web, Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems, Event-Driven Architectures and Service-Oriented Computing Applications. A RuleML-2007 Challenge with prizes will be organized to demonstrate tools, use cases, and applications. Abstracts are due June 15, 2007; papers are due June 29, 2007. The goal of RuleML-2007 is to bring together rule system providers, representatives of, and participants in, rule standardization efforts (e.g., RuleML, RIF, PRR, CL, SBVR) and open source rules communities (e.g., jBoss Rules , Jess, Prova, OO jDrew, Mandarax, XSB, XQuery), practitioners and technical experts, developers, users, and researchers. They will be offered an exciting venue to exchange new ideas, practical developments and experiences on issues related to the engineering, management, integration, interoperation and interchange of rules in open distributed environments such as the Web. A particular focus will be on practical issues such as technical contributions and show case demonstrations of effective, practical, deployable rule-based technologies, rule interchange formats and applications as well as discussions of lessons learned that have to be taken into account when employing rule-based technologies in distributed, (partially) open, heterogeneous environments.

See also: The Rule Markup Initiative

W3C/OpenAjax Alliance Workshop on Mobile Ajax
Staff, W3C Announcement

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the OpenAjax Alliance are co-sponsoring a Workshop on Mobile Ajax, to take place on 28-September-2007 in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA. The program chairs for the Workshop are Daniel Appelquist (Vodafone) and Jon Ferraiolo (IBM, OpenAjax Alliance). The goals of this workshop are to explore user and industry use cases and challenges around mobile Ajax and to help shape ongoing work in making productive use of Ajax in mobile browsers. Thus, questions that might serve as appropriate discussion points for position papers include: (1) What user experiences can Ajax enable in mobile browsers that are different from a typical mobile browsing experience? (2) What tools for creating Ajax applications for mobile browsers do developers have available to work with today? (3) What are device manufacturers and browser vendors doing in the area of mobile Ajax? (4) What differentiates Ajax development for mobile browsers from Ajax development for desktop browsers? (5) Is there a need for standardization and/or development of best practices for mobile Ajax? (6) What should the scope of any mobile-Ajax standardization activity be? To participate in the Workshop, applicants must submit a position paper by 15-August-2007 explaining their interest in the Workshop. W3C membership is not required in order to participate in the Workshop, but the total number of participants will be limited. To ensure diversity, a limit might be imposed on the maximum number of participants per organization. Workshop sessions and documents will be in English; there is no fee to participate.

See also: OpenAjax Alliance

SOA and Enterprise Architecture, Part 2: Similarities and Differences
Mamdouh Ibrahim and Gil Long, IBM developerWorks

This three-part series of articles covers the similarities and differences between SOA and EA, and shows you how to address the potential problems that result from their overlap based on a real customer engagement. In this engagement, IBM provides a broad range of business transformation and IT outsourcing services and manages all of the client's IT operations—mainframe, midrange, desktop, help desk, voice and data network, application development, and maintenance. The engagement required both SOA and EA to be developed concurrently. Part 1 of this series provided definitions and scope of both SOA and EA to establish a framework in which proper comparisons and contrasts between the two can be meaningful. It also explained that SOA and EA are more than just architecture—specifically, both are comprised of architecture, governance, and a roadmap. It provided a breakdown of the different domains of each and the governance framework for both. Part 2 (this installment), focuses on identifying the similarities and differences between SOA and EA, considering the architecture in both and identifying the overlap between their corresponding domains. It highlights the potential problems that may arise when an enterprise has developed (or is developing) an EA and is now embarking on establishing an SOA. Then we focus on the governance aspects of EA and SOA and perform analysis similar to what we did with the architecture while working on a large engagement with a Fortune 500 company in the utilities industry.

W3C Proposed Recommendation: Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 2.0
Staff, W3C Announcement

W3C has announced the advancement of the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 to the status of Proposed Recommendation. Public comment is invoted through 20-June-2007. WSDL 2.0 describes a Web service in two fundamental stages: one abstract and one concrete. Within each stage, the description uses a number of constructs to promote reusability of the description and to separate independent design concerns. At an abstract level, WSDL 2.0 describes a Web service in terms of the messages it sends and receives; messages are described independent of a specific wire format using a type system, typically XML Schema. An operation associates a message exchange pattern with one or more messages. A message exchange pattern identifies the sequence and cardinality of messages sent and/or received as well as who they are logically sent to and/or received from. An interface groups together operations without any commitment to transport or wire format. At a concrete level, a binding specifies transport and wire format details for one or more interfaces. An endpoint associates a network address with a binding. And finally, a service groups together endpoints that implement a common interface. The WSDL 2.0 specification is published in in three parts: "Part 0: Primer", "Part 1: Core Language", and "Part 2: Adjuncts." The Working Group went through a Last Call period since it changed the namespaces of the specifications as well as the URIs of the identifiers associated with the namespaces, such as the identifiers for Message Exchange Patterns (MEPs). The specifications are using the new namespace [http://www.w3.org/ns/wsdl] and consequent URIs. The test suite and the implementations are aligned with the change. The Working Group also removed two features at risk from the adjuncts specification: features/properties and several of the MEPs. The removed MEPs are being published separately in a Working Group Note.

See also: Part 2 Adjuncts

DKIM: Promising Antispam Technique Gets Nod from IETF
Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com

Spammers, phishers and other Internet bottom-feeders, be warned. A key Internet standards body gave preliminary approval on Tuesday to a powerful technology designed to detect and block fake e-mail messages. It's called DomainKeys Identified Mail, and it promises to give Internet users the best chance so far of stanching the seemingly endless flow of fraudulent junk e-mail. The draft standard that the Internet Engineering Task Force adopted is more promising than most other anti-spam and antiphishing technologies because it harnesses the power of cryptographically secure digital signatures to thwart online miscreants. The way it works is straightforward: if PayPal sends an e-mail notice to customers about their accounts, the company's outgoing mail server will quietly insert a digital signature into the legitimate message. Because the signature is embedded in the message headers, it's generally not visible to human readers. In the long run, DomainKeys is more promising than existing antispam and antiphishing technologies, which rely on techniques like assembling a "blacklist" of known fraudsters or detecting such messages by trying to identify common characteristics. But spammers have invented increasingly creative counterattacks, such as inserting image advertisements in the text of messages and appending excerpts from news articles and fiction works in an attempt to defeat the popular antispam method of Bayseian filtering. That kind of counterattack is called Bayesian poisoning. The DomainKeys approach does suffer from one serious, short-term problem: it's only effective if both the sender and recipient's mail systems are upgraded to support the standard.

SaaS Meets SOA With Help from Salesforce
Andy Patrizio, Internetnews.com

As part of its first developer conference for a still-unreleased programming language, Salesforce.com announced plans to integrate its Apex language and on-demand Web services with service oriented architectures (SOA). Salesforce.com customers have been able to produce Web services for some time, but Salesforce SOA will allow them to consume Web services as well for the first time. Salesforce SOA will use Web services to bring in workflow or processes from outside applications or systems from legacy applications, thus bridging Salesforce.com applications with data from order entry, sales or billing systems. It will also allow calls to external services from the likes of FedEx, Hoovers or Yahoo. But first, developers will need the Apex programming language, which is due in December. Separately, Salesforce.com announced the AppExchange Venture Network, a new initiative designed to help entrepreneurs and venture firms build successful on demand and Software as a Service (SaaS) companies.

Microsoft Opens Up Its Identity Management E-Wallet
Eric Lai, ComputerWorld

Microsoft Corp. has announced plans to release a free identity management specification that it says can help software developers make Web surfing more secure. Microsoft is making the Identity Selector Interoperability Profile technology freely available under its Open Specification Promise (OSP). Identity Selector is a sort of electronic wallet that securely stores an end user's personal information, according to Thom Robbins, director of Microsoft's .Net product management group. Used with the company's Windows CardSpace technology, Identity Selector can make it easier for users to log into Web sites and for sites to harvest as little or as much personal information from a user as needed to authenticate his identity. According to the announcement: "Microsoft is starting four open source projects that will help Web developers support information cards, the primary mechanism for representing user identities in the identity metasystem. These projects will implement software for specifying the Web site's security policy and accepting information cards in Java for Sun Java System Web Servers or Apache Tomcat or IBM's WebSphere Application Server, Ruby on Rails, and PHP for the Apache Web server. An additional project will implement a C Library that may be used generically for any Web site or service... An individual open source software developer or a commercial software developer can build its identity selector software and pay no licensing fees to Microsoft, nor will it need to worry about future patent concerns related to the covered specifications for that technology. In September 2006 Microsoft announced the availability of 38 Web services specifications under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). A subset of those specifications, such as WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation, addressed identity metasystem scenarios and have led to interoperable identity solutions such as Novell Inc.'s Bandit project and the Eclipse Foundation's Higgins Trust Framework Project.

See also: the announcement


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