Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Monday, 09 July 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

Apache CXF 2.0 Incubator Now Available
Developing a Web Service Using An Industry-Specific Messaging Standard
Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER): Grouping of Resources
Bringing Open Source to SOAs
Zend Framework 1.0 Ready To Compete
W3C Working Draft: Widgets 1.0 Requirements
Is Our Idea of "Open Standards" Good Enough?

Apache CXF 2.0 Incubator Now Available
Staff, Apache News Online

The Apache Incubator CXF Team recently announced the release of Apache CXF 2.0-incubator. Apache CXF is an open source services framework. CXF helps you build and develop services using frontend programming APIs, like JAX-WS. These services can speak a variety of protocols such as SOAP, XML/HTTP, RESTful HTTP, or CORBA and work over a variety of transports such as HTTP, JMS or JBI. CXF includes a broad feature set, but it is primarily focused on the following areas: (1) Web Services Standards Support: CXF supports a variety of web service standards including SOAP, the Basic Profile, WSDL, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-Security. (2) Frontends: CXF supports a variety of "frontend" programming models. CXF implements the JAX-WS APIs; version 2.0 will be TCK compliant. It also includes a "simple frontend" which allows creation of clients and endpoints without annotations. CXF supports both contract first development with WSDL and code first development starting from Java. (3) Ease of use: CXF is designed to be intuitive and easy to use. There are simple APIs to quickly build code-first services, Maven plug-ins to make tooling integration easy, JAX-WS API support, Spring 2.0 XML support to make configuration a snap, and much more. (4) Binary and Legacy Protocol Support: CXF has been designed to provide a pluggable architecture that supports not only XML but also non-XML type bindings, such as JSON and CORBA, in combination with any type of transport.

See also: the CXF web site

Developing a Web Service Using An Industry-Specific Messaging Standard
Abdul Allam and Andre Tost, IBM developerWorks

Organizations are increasingly moving toward supporting industry-specific messaging standards. This article describes an approach to developing a Web service that uses the ACORD messaging standard for an insurance industry client. With the help of an example, you can see how a Web service definition is created based on business process decomposition, including mapping data elements to their respective standard schema elements. You can also see considerations when dealing with schema maintenance, data binding, and data typing during runtime and build time. While this article offers only a glimpse into what is needed to fully utilize a standard message model, it tries to describe one key aspect of it and serves as a starting point for further discussion.

Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER): Grouping of Resources
Andrea Perego and Phil Archer (eds), W3C Technical Report

The W3C POWDER Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft for "Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER): Grouping of Resources." POWDER facilitates the publication of descriptions of multiple resources such as all those available from a Web site. The new Working Draft describes how sets of resources may be defined, either for use in Description Resources or in other contexts. An OWL Class is to be interpreted as the Resource Set with its predicates and objects either defining the characteristics that elements of the set share, or directly listing its elements. Resources that are directly identified or that can be interpreted as being elements of the set can then be used as the subject of further RDF triples.

Bringing Open Source to SOAs
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

Although large commercial vendors made early strides into the market for SOA software, open-source components are rapidly finding their way into the picture. Vendors such as Iona Technologies, Red Hat, MuleSource, WSO2, Sun Microsystems and even IBM are pushing open-source components as key pieces of service-oriented architecture implementations. To solidify its move into the open-source SOA world, Iona acquired LogicBlaze in April. Now the company will show off the fruits of that acquisition with several new initiatives designed to give customers the products, services and support programs—as well as opportunities for community participation—required to successfully incorporate open-source technology into SOA deployments. Iona is integrating its open-source Celtix products with Logic-Blaze's Fuse line of open-source SOA technologies. Iona also is dropping the Celtix name in favor of Fuse. Those products are based on projects hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. Iona also is introducing a new community-driven Web site, open.iona.com, to provide Fuse users with resources to help them build effective SOA deployments. Moreover, components can be deployed together or independently, regardless of existing systems or IT infrastructure, the company said. This differentiated approach gives customers flexibility to conform their SOA deployments to their specific needs.

See also: the Iona announcement

Zend Framework 1.0 Ready To Compete

By Sean Michael Kerner Since its inception 11 years ago, PHP has been a language for the Web. Now with the release of the Zend Framework 1.0 today, PHP becomes a language for Web applications and Web services enterprise applications. Zend Framework 1.0 is an open source framework for PHP that brings it in closer competition with JavaEE and .NET than ever before. The effort began back in October of 2005 with the first public development release appearing in March of 2006. Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans claims that they have had over 1 million downloads since the first Zend Framework development build was released, have received contributions from over 230 developers and had the support of both IBM and Google. Zend is one of the lead commercial sponsors of PHP development. Out of the gate, IBM will be using Zend Framework in its QEDWiki application and Gutmans expects that many other ISVs will redistribute Zend Framework as well. IBM is also working with the Zend Framework community on further extending the JSON support available to PHP developers. 'Zend_Xml2Json' will be a server component that enables XML to JSON conversion at the middleware server layer. Gutmans said the component is not in the 1.0 release but he expects to be including it in a future 1.1 release once it's production-ready. Also on the future roadmap is AJAX tooling for the Zend framework. Gutmans first explained the AJAX tool at the AjaxWorld Conference earlier this year. When completed, the Zend component model Ajax tool will be a full development environment complete with drag-and-drop components, cross-language debugging and advanced CSS support. Gutmans noted that it will still take more time for that functionality and that it would likely come even later than a 1.1 release.

W3C Working Draft: Widgets 1.0 Requirements
Marcos Caceres (ed), W3C Technical Report

The W3C Web Application Formats Working Group has released an updated Working Draft for "Widgets 1.0 Requirements." The document lists the design goals and requirements that the Widgets 1.0 Specification needs to address in order to standardize how Widgets are scripted, digitally signed, secured, packaged and deployed in a way that is device independent, follows W3C principles, and is as interoperable as possible with existing market-leading user agents on which Widgets are run. Widgets or gadgets are usually small client-side Web applications for displaying and updating remote data, packaged in a way to allow a single download and installation on a client machine. Typical examples of Widgets include clocks, CPU gauges, sticky notes, battery-life indicators, and Web-enabled Widgets like weather forecasters, games, news readers, email checkers, photo albums and currency converters. A Widget may execute outside of a typical Web browser interface or in a kind of application commonly referred to as a Widget Engine. There is a fairly congruent set of commonalities that most Widget Engines share: mainly their reliance on Web standards and protocols, and a strong focus on rapid development. Most Widget Engines will typically support HTTP, IRIs, and Unicode, as well as ECMAScript, various DOM levels, and the ability to render a markup language, like HTML and/or CSS, and multimedia resources such as images and sounds. To make development of Widgets possible, Widget Engines provide authors with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that are similar to those found in Web browsers as well as APIs that provide functionality that is specific to Widgets.

Is Our Idea of "Open Standards" Good Enough?
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Articles

Anyone who has been involved in community and consortium committees where there are commercial rivalries engaged knows that the thing that kills or corrupts a standard is when the spirit of mutual accommodation is overtaken by the spirit of competition. When I look over the standards that I have been to one extent involved with, at ISO, W3C and tangentially at IETF and OASIS, the golden rule is that the standards that come out of a nasty process have problems. The rancour during the Open XML debates does not auger well either for ODF and Open XML, in this respect, but I am an optimist. The trouble with the ideal that people seem have of 'open standards'is the extremely pragmatic one: how do we trust the committee? Who appoints these elders? Now this is something that MS have brought up about OASIS ODF, that ODF people have brought up about ECMA TC45, and which will undoubtedly be brought up about ISO (though ever more tenuously) by one side or the other no matter what the result is at ISO, sooner or later. I think the problem is that rather than talking 'open standards' we need to be talking as much of 'verifiable vendor-neutrality', if that is the goal for our public policy. It is nice that ODF and Open XML are open standards by the academic definitions, but it does not get us to where we need to be, and legislation based on mere 'open standards' tickboxing will not succeed in getting vendor-neutral formats, if that is indeed the underlying aim...

See also: Open Standards


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