Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Wednesday, 26 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

W3C Publishes First Public Working Drafts for POWDER Description Resources and Web Description Resources (WDR) Vocabulary
SOA: Next-Generation, Grid-Enabled Service-Oriented Architecture
IBM: Symphony Downloaded 100,000 Times in First Week
OASIS Identity and Trusted Infrastructure Workshop in Barcelona, Spain
Intalio BPMS 5.0 Integrates with Alfresco, Liferay, and Mule
Diameter XML Dictionary

W3C Publishes First Public Working Drafts for POWDER Description Resources and Web Description Resources (WDR) Vocabulary
Kevin Smith, Phil Archer, et al (eds), W3C Technical Reports

W3C's POWDER Working Group has announced the release of First Public Working Drafts for "Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER): Description Resources" and "Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER): Web Description Resources (WDR) Vocabulary." The Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) facilitates the publication of descriptions of multiple resources such as all those available from a Web site. These descriptions are attributable to a named individual, organization or entity that may or may not be the creator of the described resources. This contrasts with more usual metadata that typically applies to a single resource, such as a specific document's title, which is usually provided by its author. POWDER takes a very broad approach so that it is possible for both the resource creator and third parties to make assertions about all kinds of things, with no architectural limits on the kind of thing they are making claims about. For example, medically proficient organizations might be concerned with properties of the agencies and processes that produce Web content (e.g.. companies, people, and their credentials). Equally, a 'Mobile Web' application might need to determine the properties of various devices such as their screen dimensions, and those device types might be described with such properties by their manufacturer or by others. Although the broad approach is supported, we have focused on Web resources rather than trying to define a universal labeling system for objects. The new "Description Resources" WD explains how DRs can be created and published, whether individually or as a bulk data, how to link to DRs from other online resources, and, crucially, how DRs may be authenticated. The aim is to provide a platform through which opinions, claims and assertions about online resources can be expressed by people and exchanged by machines. The POWDER "Web Description Resources (WDR) Vocabulary" WD is the namespace document for the POWDER vocabulary. It provides a formal definition for each class and property, acting as a companion document to POWDER's Description Resources and Grouping of Resources Recommendations. In addition to the principal namespace (http://www.w3.org/2007/05/powder#), definitions are provided for OWL Classes, RDF Properties, OWL Object Properties, and OWL Datatype Properties.

See also: the WDR namespace document

SOA: Next-Generation, Grid-Enabled Service-Oriented Architecture
David Chappell and David Berry, SOA Magazine

In this article the authors cover some of the key technologies that have emerged to address common SOA scalability requirements, such as mid-tier caching, load balancing, and high availability (HA) through service-level grid enablement in support of building out high performance SOA implementations. Collectively, these infrastructure components are referred to as the 'SOA grid,' providing enterprise IT professionals with much-needed support for enabling enforceable service-level agreements (SLAs) across entire service portfolios, including Web services, messaging, custom enterprise system applications, and legacy mainframes. Certain advanced features found in an SOA grid introduce some interesting architectural design decisions. For example, one such feature allows remote nodes to cache not just the shared data objects but also the programming logic to operate on the cached data. This essentially enables more of a logic co-location versus a data fetch model. One of the main benefits of logic co-location is that it allows the process logic to operate on the node in which the data resides, thus removing any data serialization that would occur if the service were to fetch into local memory the data from a remote node. This is more advantageous for operating on larger data objects because it reduces network traffic and serialization, which can be expensive. If we were to take this discussion one step further and apply this trade-off to the SOA infrastructure, we can introduce the notion of a re-locatable BPEL process: a BPEL process that dehydrates and then rehydrates itself somewhere else on the grid to execute closer to the service and instance data that it is operating on. The net result of this is complete flexibility over where BPEL processes get executed without the usual hub-and-spoke network traffic between the BPEL engine and the services it may need to operate on. Furthermore, the network latency involved in maintaining primary and secondary grid memory management is dramatically reduced for large data objects... An SOA grid transparently solves many of the difficult problems related to achieving high availability, reliability, scalability, and performance in a distributed environment. Service-oriented architectures can fully leverage such a grid to establish a QoS infrastructure far beyond the typical distributed service integration currently delivered by conventional SOA techniques. Stateful services are the primary benefactor of the SOA grid because the requirement to persist service state is a primary bottleneck—not just in performance, but also in recoverability. In short, the SOA grid helps you attain a much faster response time with more predictable QoS. It can accomplish this with minimal configuration overhead using self-healing functionality to automatically adjust to server outages. The addition of an SOA grid as part of your fundamental infrastructure will eliminate numerous traditional inhibitors and help you realize a successful implementation and, ultimately, drive the aggressive and accelerated adoption of service-oriented computing initiatives.

See also: BPEL references

IBM: Symphony Downloaded 100,000 Times in First Week
Elizabeth Montalbano, InfoWorld

People apparently are already tuning in to IBM's Symphony. The company reports that its free rival to Microsoft's Office suite was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week of release. At first, users had to sign up for an IBM ID and password and enter identity information to download the first beta of Symphony, a free suite of office productivity applications made available last Tuesday, but users complained that this process was "too onerous," Rhodin said. IBM tweaked the process so now all people need to get Symphony is a valid e-mail address. Because of this, it's been hard to track whether it's consumers or businesses that are downloading Symphony, he said. But IBM is less interested in who is using the software than in getting it into as many hands as possible, Rhodin said. Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org and the Eclipse framework and is meant not only to give consumers and businesses an alternative to Microsoft Office, but also to promote the use of ODF (Open Document for XML), an XML-based standard for documents approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Symphony joins Sun's for-fee version of StarOffice as the latest software suite based on OpenOffice.org code to go up against Microsoft Office. So far, neither the free nor for-fee versions of OpenOffice.org have achieved any real success in cutting into Office's market share or revenue. before Symphony was released as a stand-alone product, IBM had already included it in Lotus Notes 8, the latest version of its collaboration software, another arena in which it is tweaking its strategy to battle with Microsoft. Office is playing an increasingly important role for Microsoft in this market as the company hopes to leverage the ubiquity of Office among business users by making its applications the front-end interface for worker collaboration. So far, Symphony is getting decent reviews among users, and analysts think IBM, because of its successful software history, has a better chance than others at giving Microsoft Office some real competition.

OASIS Identity and Trusted Infrastructure Workshop in Barcelona, Spain
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS has announced an identity management to be held in October 22, 2007 in Barcelona, Spain at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference Europe. The workshop, "OASIS Identity and Trusted Infrastructure Workshop: Evolutionary Milestones," is supported by the OASIS Identity and Trusted Infrastructure (IDtrust) Member Section, which promotes greater understanding and adoption of standards-based identity and trusted infrastructure technologies, policies, and practices. The group provides a neutral setting where government agencies, companies, research institutes, and individuals work together to advance the use of trusted infrastructures, including the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). International experts will discuss three areas of importance: "International Mandates and New Identity Management Challenges", "Emerging approaches to ID Management and Global Collaboration," and "ID Management and Trust Case Studies: Successes and Obstacles." The objective will be to share information between the invited representatives from various groups involved with identity management initiatives and the attendees in an effort to avoid duplication and work towards a common model for identity management standards. OASIS, EEMA, ITU, Liberty, Concordia, Geneva Security Forum and ETSI members are entitled to a discount to the Burton Group Catalyst Conference Europe.

Intalio BPMS 5.0 Integrates with Alfresco, Liferay, and Mule
Staff, Intalio Announcement

Intalio, Inc. has announced the GA release of the 'Intalio BPMS 5.0' Open Source BPM Suite, supporting the BPMN, BPEL 2.0, and BPEL4People set of industry standards for BPM. The platform supports use case design, process modeling, process simulation, complex human workflow execution, Web form generation, conditional logic mapping, advanced business rules design, and real-time process monitoring. Intalio BPMS 5.0 is built on top of the Apache ODE BPEL engine that was contributed by Intalio and promoted as a top level project by the Apache Software Foundation last month, and the Eclipse STP BPMN modeler that has been integrated into the main Eclipse release earlier this year. This release has been integrated with several other commercial open source offerings, including the Alfresco Content Management System (CMS), the Mule Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), the Liferay Portal, and the OpenLexicon Business Rule Engine (BRE). It also embeds the Apache ServiceMix Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for which Intalio now provides commercial support. Release 5.0 for Intalio BPMS is the culmination of eighteen months of research and development, during which the BPMN modeler has been re-written from the ground up in order to support the upcoming BPMN 2.0 specification, the BPEL runtime optimized to support over 100,000 process models and 250,000,000 process instances deployed on a single server, and the workflow framework extended to support the emerging BPEL4People standard. Intalio BPMS 5.0 also provides better support for process simulation, business rules management, and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).

See also: the BPMS download page

Diameter XML Dictionary
David Frascone, Mark Jones, Erik Guttman; IETF Internet Draft

The Diameter Base Protocol (Diameter - IETF RFC 3588) is an extensible protocol used to provide Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) services to different access technologies. It specifies the message format, transport, error reporting, accounting and security services to be used by all Diameter applications. To maintain extensibility, Diameter uses a dictionary to provide it with the format of commands and AVPs. This document describes the representation of the Diameter dictionary using XML. The root or top-level element of a Diameter dictionary is the 'dictionary' element. The dictionary element contains zero or more 'vendor' elements, the 'base' element and zero or more 'application' elements. The top-level XML file containing the 'dictionary' element SHOULD be named 'dictionary.xml'. Each 'application' element SHOULD be defined in a separate XML file and referenced from the top-level XML file using an external entity declaration. AVP rules elements define the placement of key AVPs within commands. They are used to do some semantic checking at the protocol layer. For example, a particular AVP might be required to be first in a particular message. This element can define those rules. The requestrules and answerrules elements define the placement of key AVPs within request and answer commands respectively. These elements may be used to perform syntax checking at the protocol layer.


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