Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Tuesday, 09 October 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:
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com

Headlines

Open Source CMSes Prove Well Worth the Price
XML Schema for Media Control
Harvard Professor Envisions Enterprise 2.0 Web Services
Intel XML Software Suite 1.0 Beta
Expand the Editing Capabilities of OpenOffice with XSLT
US XML 2007 Schedule
Zend Brings Microsoft Into the PHP Fold

Open Source CMSes Prove Well Worth the Price
Mike Heck, InfoWorld

Open source Web CMSes (content management systems): it's important to look for not just functionality but also frequent updates, a healthy user community, and the availability of professional support. Some points are still true today, but new offerings may get you rethinking the role of these products in your enterprise. That's one of my takeaways in my most recent foray into the world of open source CMSes, during which I looked at the latest offerings from Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal and Joomla, and Plone. The one constant among these offerings, as with any open source area, is there's no such thing as free. You'll still need to budget for datacenter staff to install and maintain applications, consider costs for custom programming and commercial add-ons, and factor in training. Today's CMSes, however, are friendlier for IT staff to maintain and generally don't have the extreme end-user learning requirements of a few years ago. Another positive is more standardization, which may translate to lower development costs. For example, Alfresco's based on a JSR-170 repository, integrates with JSR-168 portals, and can be extended by those with Java skills. Alfresco has a superstar lineup of experienced executives and developers previously with Business Objects, Documentum, Interwoven, Oracle, and Vignette. The result of their work shows in the quality and depth of Alfreso's Community Release, earning it the top spot in our evaluation. When I last reviewed Version 1.2.1 of Alfresco, it was primarily a document management system. That's changed, though, over the previous year. Alfresco 2.1 extends Web content management while adding record and image management, federated search, and better ease of use through the Alfresco AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web client. Another plus for Alfresco is its flexible licensing with the FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software-only) exception. This lets you embed the Alfresco JSR-170 content repository into other projects—without having to license the entire Alfresco community package... The lightweight Drupal has a decent following and special features, such as taxonomies, but comparatively weaker CMS functions (lacking rich-text editing, for example) and a somewhat unfriendly development environment mean Durpal is playing catch-up. Joomla, after breaking from Mambo, swept up many core developers and swayed community members to switch, too. Collectively, they've turned Joomla into a very relevant project. With improvements planned for Version 1.5, I'm optimistic about this CMS. DotNetNuke (the .Net reincarnation of PHPnuke) wasn't originally on my short list, but I'm glad I reconsidered. Although it's Windows-only, this ASP.Net application proved scalable and has a real affinity for handling midrange commerce activities. Plone is a step above, combining multilingual features, workflow, and automated navigation. With a strong organization behind it and a slew of features, Alfresco's Community Edition stood out in this comparison.

XML Schema for Media Control
Orit Levin, Roni Even, Pierre Hagendorf (eds), IETF Internet Draft

IESG announced that members of the IETF Multiparty Multimedia Session Control (MMUSIC) Working Group have released an Internet Draft for consideration as an IETF Informational RFC. The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits final comments on this proposed action. The document defines an XML Schema for video fast update request in a tightly controlled environment, developed by Microsoft, Polycom, Radvision and used by multiple vendors. Implementation of this schema for interactive video applications in SIP environments was designed in order to improve user experience. This mechanism is being used by both end user video conferencing terminals and conferencing servers in shipping products. This document describes the current method, but new implementations are discouraged from using this method, except for backward compatibility with legacy systems. Shipping products and new products SHALL use the full intra request described in "Codec Control Messages in the RTP Audio-Visual Profile with Feedback (AVPF)". Sending video fast update using the SIP signaling path, as described in this document, is inferior to using the RTCP feedback method, since the command flows through all the proxies in the signaling path adding delay to the messages and causing unnecessary overload to the proxies. RTCP messages flow end to end and not through the signaling proxies. The RTCP feedback draft also adds other required control functions, such as flow control command which is missing from this document. The IETF Multiparty MUltimedia SessIon Control (MMUSIC) Working Group was chartered to develop protocols to support Internet teleconferencing and multimedia communications.

Harvard Professor Envisions Enterprise 2.0 Web Services
Rich Seeley, SearchWebServices.com

Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee believes that wikis, blogs and social networks will be combining with Web Services and Ajax in the corporate world to form what he calls "Enterprise 2.0." Enterprise 2.0 has the potential to be an IT and corporate game changer McAfee told Sonny Singh, senior vice president in the Industries Business Unit at Oracle Corp. in a Webcast last week. McAfee answered questions about Enterprise 2.0 from the Oracle executive and audience members at the event previewing Oracle's plans to integrate Enterprise 2.0 into its middleware, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) offerings. Enterprise 2.0 will be a theme at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco next month, the executives said. McAfee said he first realized the potential of Web 2.0 technologies to become an Enterprise 2.0 platform while studying more traditional corporate software applications including ERP, BPM, supply chain management and customer relationship management (CRM). At first, he was skeptical about the value of Web 2.0 for business, but hands-on experience convinced him that it had potential.

Intel XML Software Suite 1.0 Beta
Staff, Intel Software Announcement

Thorsten Moeller posted an announcement for the release of the Intel XML Software Suite Beta. The Beta package provides high performance XSLT processing, XPath, XML Parsing, DOM/SAX support, and XML Schema Validation functionality for Java and C/C++ environments. The software is optimized for the newer Core micro-architecture but it will run on older Intel processors too, e.g. Intel Celeron M, Pentium 4, Pentium D. Intel XML Software Suite provides a high level of XML conformance with a 98% pass rate or higher for the W3C and OASIS XML Conformance Test Suites. Intel XML Software Suite achieves high performance for XML processing. The software suite's efficient design provides more than twice the performance compared to competitive Open Source solutions, enabling fast throughput for business processes. (1) 2X over Apache XSLTC; (2) 2X over Apache Xalan-C++* XPath; (3) 2X over Apache Xerces Java Parser for Schema Validation; (4) 6X over Apache Xerces-C++ for Parsing. From the product overview: "Enterprises are widely adopting and deploying Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions. Many SOA implementations rely on message formats defined with XML. The extensibility and structured nature of XML allows it to be used for communication between different systems. XML also allows a single source of material to be easily formatted and consumed by many different presentation vehicles (i.e. 'readers'). This verbosity, extensibility and flexibility of XML messages can create performance challenges for software developers to overcome. Intel XML Software Suite is a comprehensive suite of high-performance C++ and Java software-based runtime libraries for Linux and Windows operating systems, delivering maximum performance for eXtensible Markup Language (XML) processing on industry standard servers and application environments. Intel XML Software Suite is standards compliant, to allow for easy integration into existing XML processing environments and is optimized to support complex and large-size XML document processing.

See also: Intel XML products

Expand the Editing Capabilities of OpenOffice with XSLT
Jonathan Levin, IBM developerWorks Tutorial

You might know that you can pull XML data into OpenOffice's spreadsheet program, Calc, but did you know that you can create a filter to make word-processing documents out of data stored as XML? This tutorial shows you how to use OpenOffice's import/export filters to open your XML data as though it's just a plain document. From there, users can edit the document much more naturally and then save it back to its native format. You can also use this feature to easily turn your documents into XML data. tutorial is for users of OpenOffice, with a penchant for XML. If you're comfortable with the rigid syntax of the XML file format, and have dabbled with XML Style Language Transformations (XSLT), a world of possibilities opens up when you use OpenOffice as a custom editor for any type of XML-based data. This tutorial demonstrates the power of XSLT harnessed for the automatic manipulation and transformation of any XML-based data to and from the OpenDocument format, thereby bridging the divide between machine-readable XML and human-friendly hypertext. OpenOffice evolved from yet another open source product to a full fledged suite of efficient and secure office applications—free and highly extensible—gaining more clout along the way from industry giants such as Sun Microsystems and, recently, IBM. This tutorial focuses on a single facet of OpenOffice's extensibility, working with XML and XSLT filter files to allow plugin support for any data in the XML form. You can store data as machine-friendly XML and still edit it in a human-friendly, custom manner. The former allows easy searches, semantic context and information retrieval, whereas the latter enables efficient editing in an advanced hypertext environment.

US XML 2007 Schedule
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Blog

The schedule is up for the US XML 2007 conference in Boston in December [3-5, 2007], and it looks a cracker. Here are the papers that seem interesting to me: (1) Monday 10:30. "XML Hardware Eugene Kuznetsov (IBM)"; (2) Monday 2:00 "Analysis of an architecture for data validation in end-to-end XML processing systems," John Clark (Cleveland Clinic Foundation), Chimezie Ogbuji (Cleveland Clinic); (3) Monday 2:45 "Implementing Healthcare Messaging with XML," Marc de Graauw (Marc de Graauw IT): seems to come to the same conclusions (from an XSD perspective) that underpin Schematron's phases mechanism, that layering and separation of concerns is important; (4) Monday 4:00 "XProc: An XML Pipeline Language," Norman Walsh (Sun Microsystems, Inc.) where the program notes say that XProc has changed recently, so it would be interesting to see how it is going - ISO DSDL support is one of its use cases; (5) Monday 4:45 "XML and XPath in the Wild," Adam Lee (Stanford University): empirical studies of documents found on the web are a very weak basis for saying anything about XML documents, since XML is used (SGML-like) for so many back-ends, but it is really important that we have them nevertheless, and it will be great to see if we get some real work on document metrics happening... ; (6) Tuesday 9:00 "Semantic data models and business context modelling," Anthony Coates (Miley Watts LLP)...

Zend Brings Microsoft Into the PHP Fold
Sean Michael Kerner, InternetNews.com

PHP vendor Zend is set to kick off its annual ZendCon conference with a number of announcements that will make the open source development language more attractive to Microsoft Windows platform users. The improvement of PHP's performance on Windows is a result of a joint effort between Zend and Microsoft. "Both sides are making the investment to make sure that PHP is a first-class citizen on Windows," Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans told InternetNews.com. "ASP and PHP compete, but it is a win for both sides to make sure that interoperability is there." Included in the features Zend and Microsoft have improved upon in PHP is a FastCGI module of Microsoft's IIS Web server, which will accelerate PHP's performance. The module is freely available for both II6 and II7 users and will run on Windows Server 2003 and will be included as part of the upcoming Windows Server 2008 release. Database connectivity for PHP is an important item as most enterprise applications rely on a database for their content stores. As such, Zend already has worked with IBM's DB2, Oracle and the open source MySQL database to try and make sure that PHP works well with all of those vendors. As part of its collaboration with Microsoft, Zend is also working on integrating Microsoft's CardSpace (formerly known as InfoCard) identity-management framework into the Zend Framework. The Zend Framework, which recently hit its 1.0 release, is PHP's answer to .NET and Java EE.

See also: InfoWorld


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