Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Thursday, 09 August 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:
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

Headlines

Real Web 2.0: Quick and Dirty Web Applications with Bookmarklets
IBM, Zend Tighten PHP Partnership
SAP NetWeaver Process Integration Version 7.1: A New Architecture and Enhanced SOA Capabilities
CSS Level 3 Working Drafts: Box Model and Advanced Layout
OASIS TCs to Standardize Service Component Architecture (SCA) for SOA
An Introduction to JavaFX Script for Java Programmers
Apache Pluto 1.1.4 Released

Real Web 2.0: Quick and Dirty Web Applications with Bookmarklets
Uche Ogbuji, IBM developerWorks

This article shows how to combine bookmarks and scripting to create customized applications of surprising sophistication. Web 2.0 is well known for the fact that it's not built on breathtaking new inventions, but rather on renewed emphasis on age-old Web technologies. One of those age-old technologies that is enjoying a revival in Web 2.0 is bookmarklets. A bookmarklet is essentially a Web application shoehorned into a regular browser bookmark. You can use a special form of link supported by almost every sort of Web browser, using the special URL scheme 'javascript:'. Bookmarklets are executed entirely on the browser, as are, say Java applets. They are executed as if they were loaded in script statements on the page itself, so they are a powerful tool for customizing your Web experience and taking some control back from the server side. Bookmarklets are suited for many tasks, including: (1) submitting the page to a Web-based tool such as a bookmarking service or a validation service; (2) querying data from the page and submitting it to a Web-based tool; (3) manipulating the content, presentation, or navigation of a page; (4) analyzing a page to display useful facts and statistics; (5) controlling dynamic Web page features, such as playing and pausing audio or video. In effect you can use a bookmarklet to add features to your browser itself with a minimum of programming, or none at all, if someone else has already written a bookmarklet to meet your need. If you have any experience with ECMAScript, you can use bookmarklets as a great way to experiment with, develop, and deploy enhancements to Web pages. If you aren't an ECMAScript developer, you can still benefit from the many bookmarklets developed by others.

IBM, Zend Tighten PHP Partnership
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

At the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo on August 8, 2007, Zend and IBM announced deeper integration between Zend Core for IBM and IBM DB2. With the integration, organizations can now deploy open-source PHP and DB2 across a wide variety of hardware and operating systems and obtain support from a single source. As part of the expanded partnership, Zend and IBM announced enhanced DB2 Express-C capabilities in Zend Core for IBM, the certified PHP solution from Zend, and new support for DB2 Connect technology providing access to scalable i5/OS and z/OS DB2 data servers. In addition, there will be unified, single-source support for the integrated PHP and DB2 solution stack and support for System i Linux partitions and the System i attached BladeCenter and System x servers. Zend Core for IBM provides a PHP-based application development and deployment stack, which includes Apache, PHP, Zend Framework and DB2 Express-C. IBM, headquartered in Armonk, N.Y., uses Zend Framework as the basis for its QEDWiki project, which enables both developers and non-developers to assemble sophisticated Web 2.0 applications by integrating or mashing up Web services. The Zend framework is made up of an MVC application framework, database support, internationalization services, Web services and foundation framework services.

See also: QEDWiki

SAP NetWeaver Process Integration Version 7.1: A New Architecture and Enhanced SOA Capabilities
Jean-Jacques Dubray, InfoQ

SAP is ramping up for the launch of its latest version of the SAP NetWeaver Process Integration platform. Product Manager Sindhu Gangadharan said SAP NWPI v7.1 will be available next month. This platform is designed to cover all integration needs for SAP or non-SAP customers. Interestingly, the new architecture allows 'adapter to adapter' communication, bypassing any integration server. This confirms the current trend in the industry in distributing ESB capabilities onto the edges, at the services activation layer, rather than forcing all interactions to go through a central piece of infrastructure. Centralized elements of the architecture are only involved when they add value to the interaction (e.g., a Registry). Architecturally, NWPI establishes a strong coupling between BPM and SOA as services are always designed to be part of a business process. This is further reinforced by SAP's SOA methodology. Other key components of SAP's model include process components and business objects. New functionality provided by NWPI v7.1: (1) A new Enterprise Services Repository which can be used both at design time and run time. The repository is "high volume ready" and supports UDDI v3.0. The repository implements governance processes and offer a central visibility of the services and their artifacts. Includes full support for the latest web services standards including WS-Policy, WS-TX and support for WS-ReliableMessaging (WS-RM). (2) Support for incoming message validation using XML Schema: support for Events which are a key element of the product. It introduces the notion of Global Events available across all processes to be reacted upon. (3) Message bulking for asynchronous invocations has been introduced which helps throughput by a factor of 3x to 4x. (4) Support for principal propagation which is a pre-requisite for building composite applications. The upcoming release of SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (SAP PI) supports standards like Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), and Web Service Reliable Messaging (WS-RM); this involves Principal Propagation solution for the WS-RM protocol which is based on SAML. Principal propagation allows to securely pass the identity of a user from a sender application to a receiver application. For the mediated scenario (via SAP PI) using the new web service reliable messaging protocol for instance, this means that the web service on the web service provider system runs under the same user as the web service consumer application. NWPI v7.1 is built on a JEE 5 foundation which helps memory consumption.

CSS Level 3 Working Drafts: Box Model and Advanced Layout
Bert Bos (ed), W3C Technical Reports

The W3C CSS Working Group has released two updated Working Drafts for the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) language Level 3. (1) "CSS Basic Box Model" describes the basic layout of textual documents in visual media. Cascading Style Sheets describes the rendering of documents on various media. When textual documents (e.g., HTML) are laid out on visual media (e.g., screen or print), CSS models the document as a hierarchy of boxes containing words, lines, paragraphs, tables, etc. each with properties such as size, color and font. The box module describes the basic types of boxes, with their padding and margin, and the normal flow (i.e., the sequence of blocks of text with margins in-between). It also defines floating boxes, but other kinds of layout, such as tables, absolute positioning, ruby annotations, grid layouts, columns and numbered pages, are described by other modules. Also, the layout of text inside each line (including the handling of left-to-right and right-to-left scripts) is defined elsewhere. Boxes may contain either horizontal or vertical lines of text. Boxes of different orientations may be mixed in one flow. (2) The "CSS Advanced Layout Module" specification is another part of level 3 of CSS and contains features to describe layouts at a high level, meant for tasks such as the positioning and alignment of widgets in a graphical user interface or the layout grid for a page or a window, in particular when the desired visual order is different from the order of the elements in the source document. The properties in this specification work by associating a layout policy with an element. Rather than letting an element lay out its descendants in their normal order as inline text or as blocks of text (the policies available in CSS level 1), these policies give an element an invisible grid for aligning descendant elements. One policy also allows elements to be stacked similar to tabbed cards, of which only one is visible at any time. Since layouts on the Web have to adapt to different window and paper sizes, the rows and columns of the grid can be made fixed or flexible in size.

See also: CSS Current Work

OASIS TCs to Standardize Service Component Architecture (SCA) for SOA
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS has formed six new technical committees to simplify SOA application development by advancing the SCA family of specifications. SCA defines a flexible model for creating business solutions using service components. The work will be organized within the OASIS Open Composite Services Architecture (Open CSA) Member Section, and the resulting specifications will be offered for implementation on a royalty-free basis. Anne Thomas Manes, Vice President and Research Director for Burton Group: "SCA is based on the idea that business functions are provided as a series of services that can be wired together to create solutions for particular business needs. These composite applications can contain new services created specifically for the application and reuse existing business functions from existing systems. SCA offers the potential to streamline the SOA design process by enabling the delivery of easy-to-use tools developers need to transform IT assets into reusable services." The SCA model encompasses a wide range of technologies for service components, access methods that connect them, and policy that provides declarative qualities of service. For components, this includes not only different programming languages, but also frameworks and environments commonly used with those languages. For access methods, SCA compositions allow for the use of various communication and service access technologies in common use. For policy, this includes a framework for integrating commonly used policy languages and quality of service expressions.

See also: the Open CSA Member Section

An Introduction to JavaFX Script for Java Programmers
Robert Eckstein, Sun Developer Network

The JavaFX Script programming language is a declarative, statically typed scripting language from Sun Microsystems, Inc. As mentioned on the Open JavaFX (OpenJFX) web site, JavaFX technology has a wealth of features, including the ability to make direct calls to Java technology APIs. Because JavaFX Script is statically typed, it also has the same code structuring, reuse, and encapsulation features—such as packages, classes, inheritance, and separate compilation and deployment units—that make it possible for your to create and maintain very large programs using Java technology. This series of three articles will help you get started with the JavaFX programming language. Part 1 of this series is an introduction to the JavaFX programming language, targeted to those who are already familiar with Java technology and the basics of scripting languages. Parts 2 and 3 of the series show how to use JavaFX technology to connect to a remote server using technologies such as Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and the Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS).

See also: the JavaFX web site

Apache Pluto 1.1.4 Released
Staff, Apache Pluto Project Announcement

"The Apache Pluto project is proud to announce the general availability of Pluto 1.1.4, the latest stable release of the JSR-168 (Java Portlet Specification 1.0) reference implementation. This is the fifth GA release of the 1.1 line of Pluto. Pluto 1.1 is a major refactoring of Pluto 1.0. Pluto 1.1 provides simpler integration of the portlet container, and simpler configuration of the Pluto portal driver (a simple portal included with Pluto). Pluto 1.1.4 includes support for JSP 2.1, updates to the Pluto Portal, Tomcat 6 installation support, and bug fixes related to url and portlet request attribute handling... Portlets are designed to run in the context of a portal. They are written to the Portlet API which are similar to the Servlet API. In contrast to servlets, portlets may not do things like sending redirects or errors to browsers directly, forwarding requests or writing arbitrary markup to the output stream to assure that they don't distract the portal web application which uses them. Another difference compared to servlets is that portlets rely on portal specific infrastructure functions such as access to user profile information, standard interface for storing/retrieving persistent settings, getting client information, etc. Generally, portlets are administrated more dynamically than servlets typically are. A portlet container provides a runtime environment for portlets implemented according to the Portlet API. In this environment portlets can be instantiated, used and finally destroyed. The portlet container is not a stand-alone container like the servlet container; instead it is implemented as a thin layer on top of the servlet container and reuses the functionality provided by the servlet container. Pluto serves as portlet container that implements the Portlet API and offers developers a working example platform from which they can test their portlets. However, it's cumbersome to execute and test the portlet container without a driver, in this case, the portal. Pluto's simple portal component is built only on the portlet container's and the JSR 168's requirements... The Java Portlet API version 2.0 specification is now under development by the JSR-286 Expert Group under the auspices of the Java Community Process. Version 2.0 of the Portlet Specification is intended to align with J2EE 1.4, integrate other new JSRs relevant for the portlet, and align with the WSRP specification Version 2.0."


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