Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Tuesday, 25 September 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 Tuscany SCA Java 1.0 Released
ENUM Validation Information Mapping for the Extensible Provisioning Protocol
Liberty Alliance Announces Winners of Identity Deployment Awards
New Ping Identity Initiative Brings Secure Internet Single Sign-On to Software-as-a-Service Providers
Mobile Ajax: W3C and OpenAjax Alliance Sponsor Joint Workshop
Nexaweb Launches New Web 2.0 Suite
Converting XML Schemas to Schematron: Part 1
Gloomy Forecast for U.S. IT Work Force

Apache Tuscany SCA Java 1.0 Released
Staff, Apache Tuscany Team Announcement

The Apache Tuscany Team has announced the 1.0 release of the Java SCA project, representing a major milestone as the first 1.0 implementation of the core SCA specifications. Apache Tuscany provides a runtime based on the Service Component Architecture. SCA is a set of specifications aimed at simplifying SOA Application Development which are being standardized at OASIS as part of Open Composite Services Architecture (Open CSA). The Tuscany SCA Runtime can be configured as a single node SCA domain or as an SCA domain distributed across multiple nodes. In addition Tuscany SCA supports the following host-deployment options: running standalone; running with distributed nodes across multiple JVMs; running with embedded Jetty or Tomcat; running as a standard web application; running as a module in Geronimo. The Apache Tuscany SCA 1.0 release includes implementations of the main SCA specifications including: SCA Assembly Model V1.0; SCA Policy Framework V1.0; SCA Java Common Annotations and APIs V1.0; SCA Java Component Implementation V1.0; SCA Spring Component Implementation V1.0; SCA BPEL Client and Implementation V1.0; SCA Web Services Binding V1.0; SCA EJB Session Bean Binding V1.0. It also includes implementations of many features not yet defined by SCA specifications, including: (1) SCA bindings for Direct Web Remoting, RSS and ATOM Feeds, HTTP resources, JSON-RPC, PUB/SUB Notifications, and RMI. (2) SCA implementation types for OSGI, XQuery, BPEL, and various dynamic languages including Groovy, Javascript, Python, and Ruby. (3) Databindings for Service Data Objects (SDO), JAXB, XMLBeans, Axis2's AXIOM, JSON, SAXON, DOM, SAX and StAX.

See also: the Apache Tuscany Project

ENUM Validation Information Mapping for the Extensible Provisioning Protocol
Bernie Hoeneisen (ed), IETF Internet Draft

IESG announced that the "ENUM Validation Information Mapping for the Extensible Provisioning Protocol" has been approved as a Proposed Standard. The document has been produced by members of the IETF Telephone Number Mapping (ENUM) Working Group, part of the IETF Real-time Applications and Infrastructure Area. IESG contact persons are Jon Peterson and Cullen Jennings; additional review of XML usage was provided by Scott Hollenbeck. The document describes an Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) extension framework for mapping information about the validation process that has been applied for the E.164 number (or number range), which the E.164 Number Mapping (ENUM) domain name is based on. Specified in the Extensible Markup Language (XML), this mapping extends the EPP domain name mapping to provide an additional feature required for the provisioning of ENUM domain names.

Liberty Alliance Announces Winners of Identity Deployment Awards
Staff, Liberty Alliance Announcement

Liberty Alliance recently announced winners of the 2007 Identity Deployment of the Year (IDDY) Award. IDDY Award nominations are evaluated based on criteria that include the benefits applications deliver to users and organizations; the ROI the application is demonstrating; and how the solution may successfully address identity issues such as reducing identity theft, meeting regulatory requirements or providing users with increased security and privacy protection. The program includes an emerging applications category to showcase up-and-coming Liberty-based applications and proof-of-concepts that are driving the next generation of secure and trusted digital identity management solutions. This year Liberty Alliance awarded four IDDYs recognizing digital identity management applications built using Liberty's open, privacy-respecting and proven interoperable identity specifications. Winners were announced at DIDW 2007 where eBIZ.mobility, the New Zealand Government, NTT Labs and Rearden Commerce were awarded the 2007 IDDY. (1) eBIZ.mobility provides unique digital content payment processing, called OneTouch Online Purchasing, for banks, telecom service providers and digital content providers that is suited to the 'open garden' model of consumer Internet browsing. (2) The New Zealand Government is developing a user centric framework to better utilize the Internet to meet strategic eGovernment transformation goals. Led by the State Services Commission, the project has a working title of GOAAMS (Government Online Attribute Assertion Meta System) and is being developed to enable every citizen and participating organization to use the authoritative data held about them online and in real-time, rather than having to repeatedly submit the same information across government systems. The project will use SAML (v2 at present) and Liberty Web Services (ID-WSF). (3) NTT Labs has developed SASSO, a personal Identity Provider that enables users to single-sign-on to a PC and leverage the strong authentication capabilities of the mobile phone to conduct a wide range of secure identity-based transactions. SASSO uses the increasingly ubiquitous mobile phone as an Identity Provider (IdP) to allow users to access a Service Provider (SP). By leveraging the mobile phone as an identity-aware client, SASSO demonstrates a convergence of the OpenID, Cardspace and SAML styles of user-centric identity management. (4) Delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS) to more than half a million employees in six hundred companies, the Rearden Personal Assistant leverages federation technology to help users find and purchase the services they need based on their preferences and company policies. Rearden Commerce exposes SAML and WS-Federation endpoints with the Rearden Personal Assistant relying on PingFederate for multi-protocol support and proven interoperability.

See also: Liberty Alliance references

New Ping Identity Initiative Brings Secure Internet Single Sign-On to Software-as-a-Service Providers
Staff, Ping Identity Announcement

Ping Identity has announced a new program that gives SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) providers the ability to offer secure, standards-based single sign-on (SSO) to their enterprise clients. Elements of the program include use of Ping Identity's award-winning PingFederate federated identity server, a unique 'pay-as-you-go' pricing model that aligns with SaaS business models, joint marketing and joint support. Under the terms of this new program, SaaS providers will receive PingFederate servers and Integration Kits for development and production use. When they sell secure SSO to their clients, they share the resulting revenue with Ping Identity. Also, program members can optionally resell PingFederate to their clients who do not already have SAML or WS-Federation capabilities, or refer their clients directly to Ping Identity and subsequently earn a referral fee. As more and more enterprises are making a strategic shift from premises-based to hosted applications, many are requiring SSO support in SaaS Requests for Proposals. While proprietary SSO can and does work effectively inside the enterprise, this approach does not scale well in a world where enterprises have multiple SaaS providers, and SaaS providers have multiple enterprise clients. Standards-based federated identity was created to support exactly these types of company-to-company secure interoperability scenarios. Since federated identity is based on industry standard protocols such as SAML and WS-Federation, a given enterprise or SaaS provider can support any number of federation partner connections with a single piece of infrastructure software, a federated identity server.

Mobile Ajax: W3C and OpenAjax Alliance Sponsor Joint Workshop
Staff, W3C Announcement

A Workshop on Mobile Ajax co-sponsored by W3C and the OpenAjax Alliance will be held 28-September-2007 in Mountain View, CA, USA, hosted by Microsoft. The program chairs for the Workshop are Daniel Appelquist (Vodafone) and Jon Ferraiolo (IBM, OpenAjax Alliance). The workshop will be minuted and the minutes will be made publicly available on the W3C site as soon as possible after the workshop, and a link to those minutes will be posted here at that time. Attendees will explore use cases for mobile Ajax to help shape its use in mobile Web browsers. Topics may include user experience, application development, support in today's devices and browsers, and whether needs exist for standardization and best practices. The goals of this workshop are to explore user and industry use cases and challenges around Ajax applications on mobile devices and to help shape ongoing work in making productive use of Ajax in mobile browsers. Thus, questions that may 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 Ajax applications on mobile dev W3C's Mobile Web Initiative (W3C MWI) addresses interoperability 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.

See also: the position papers

Nexaweb Launches New Web 2.0 Suite
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

Nexaweb Technologies has released its latest Web 2.0 application development platform, the Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite. Nexaweb's Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite embraces the complementary relationship of SOA and Web 2.0, and interoperates with a number of other leading Web 2.0 and SOA technology providers, including Kapow Technologies for Web-based data services, Layer 7 for application access and governance and Hewlett-Packard's Systinet Registry for SOA artifact indexing and discovery. Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite features the Eclipse-based Nexaweb Studio IDE (integrated development environment). New and enhanced features in the suite include a visual editor with drag-and-drop capability; data binding capabilities; and a snap-to-grid feature that enables the automatic alignment of widgets, allowing them to be moved, resized and placed in containers. The new release of the suite also features integrated AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Java development perspectives in a single design matrix. The suite also features new integrated debugging and Web service testing tools to help support SOA integration.

Converting XML Schemas to Schematron: Part 1
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Articles

Recently Topologi have been working on an actual implementation for a client [for converting XML Schemas to Schematron]: a series of XSLT 2 scripts that we want to release as open source in a few months time. Why would you want to convert XSD to Schematron? The prime reason is to get better diagnostics: grammar-based diagnostics basically don't work, the last two decades of SGML/XML DTD/XSD experiences makes plain. People find them difficult to interpret and they give the response in terms of the grammar not the information domain. Basically, we have a two-stage architecture: the first stage (3 XSLTs) takes all the XSD schema files and does a big series of macro processes on them, to make a single document that contains all the top-level schemas for each namespace, with all references resolved by substitution (except for simple types which we keep). This single big file gets rid off almost all the complications of XSD, which in terms makes it much simpler to then generate the Schematron assertions. We have so far made the preprocessor, implemented simple type checking (including derivation by restriction) and the basic exception content models (empty, ALL, mixed content), with content models under way at the moment. I think the pre-processor stage might be useful for other projects involving XML Schemas.

See also: XML Schema languages

Gloomy Forecast for U.S. IT Work Force
Roy Mark, eWEEK

A growing lack of digital literacy, math and science skills may cost America its global competitiveness. The topic was education and the talk was not optimistic at the Institute for a Competitive Workforce's September 25 [2007] workshop. A part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ICW drew several hundred participants to its event, held with the goal of promoting effective and sustainable business and education/work force partnerships. "Our continued leadership is not inevitable and may not be sustainable," Fred Tipson, Microsoft's senior policy counsel, said in an afternoon panel discussion focused on upgrading the current and future work force's digital literacy and math and science skills. "The question is whether our work force or some other country's will be beneficiaries of new technology." Tipson referred to America's ability to continue to produce high school and college graduates with the skills needed to be successful in today's technology work force as "dire." Judy Moog, national program director of the Verizon Foundation, gave the panel participants little reason to question Tipson or Whaley's statements. According to Moog, 70 percent of the nation's eighth graders are below sufficient levels in reading skills and "might well never catch up." Moog also pointed out that in terms of "quality" of high school graduates, America has fallen to 19th out of 26 nations surveyed. Moreover, she said, nearly half the U.S. adult population—some 93 million people—have very poor or marginal literacy skills. Tipson said Microsoft breaks down the issue into three phases: digital literacy, in which a person learns basic skills, digital fluency, meaning the skills are applied, and digital mastery, in which the first two steps are translated into advanced skills...


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