Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Monday, 19 November 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

DAISY Consortium and Microsoft Collaborate to Develop OpenXML to DAISY XML Converter
MPDF: A User Agent Profile Data Set for Media Policy
Visual Studio 2008 Ships
2^W: The Second Coming of the Web
Using XML and Jar Utility API to Build a Rule-Based Java EE Auto-Deployer
Oracle Customers Like Compression, Storage Management, XML Handling
NETCONF Configuration Interface Advertisement with WSDL and XSD

DAISY Consortium and Microsoft Collaborate to Develop OpenXML to DAISY XML Converter
Staff, DAISY Consortium Announcement

The DAISY Consortium (Digital Accessible Information System Consortium) recently announced a collaborative effort with Microsoft to the release a "Save As DAISY XML" feature next year. The DAISY Standard has been adopted throughout the world by libraries and organizations producing and distributing accessible reading materials. This collaboration between Microsoft and the DAISY Consortium is a major breakthrough in the movement to provide feature-rich, structured information to the millions of people around the world who are unable to read print due to a visual, physical, perceptual, developmental, cognitive, or learning disability. The free, downloadable plug-in for Microsoft Word will convert Open XML-based word processing documents into DAISY XML, technically referred to as DTBook. DAISY XML, or DTBook, is the foundation of the globally accepted DAISY Standard for reading and publishing navigable multimedia content. The DAISY XML that is generated is the marked up file that can then be processed to produce DAISY Digital Talking Books and other accessible formats. This "Open XML to DAISY XML" converter will be one of several authoring and conversion options that produce DTBook. The development will be hosted on SourceForge. "Save As DAISY XML" creates a DAISY XML file (DTBook) which requires further processing to become a DAISY Digital Talking Book (DTB). This additional processing may be accomplished using a number of commercial and open source conversion and production tools.

See also: the NISO press release

MPDF: A User Agent Profile Data Set for Media Policy
Volker Hilt, Gonzalo Camarillo, Jonathan Rosenberg (eds); IETF I-D

Members of the IETF Session Initiation Proposal Investigation Working Group have published an updated version of the "User Agent Profile Data Set for Media Policy" Internet Draft. This draft specification defines a document format for the media properties of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) sessions. Examples for media properties are the codecs or media types used in a session. This document format is based on XML and extends the Schema for SIP User Agent Profile Data Sets. It can be used to describe the properties of a specific SIP session or to define policies that are then applied to different SIP sessions. Section 8 supplies the RELAX NG Definition. The Framework for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) User Agent Profile Delivery and the Framework for SIP Session Policies define mechanisms to convey session policies and configuration information from a network server to a user agent. An important piece of the information conveyed to the user agent relates to the media properties of the SIP sessions set up by the user agent. Examples for these media properties are the codecs and media types used, the media-intermediaries to be traversed or the maximum bandwidth available for media streams. The Media Policy Dataset Format (MPDF) specification is defined in this document for SIP session media properties. This format can be used in two ways: first, it can be used to describe the properties of a given SIP session (e.g., the media types and codecs used). These MPDF documents are called session info documents and they are usually created based on the session description of a session. Second, the MPDF format can be used to define policies for SIP sessions in a session policy document. A session policy document defines properties (e.g., the media types) that can or can not be used in a session, independent of a specific session description. The two types of MPDF documents, session information and session policy documents, share the same set of XML elements to describe session properties. A user agent can receive multiple session policy documents from different sources. These documents need to be merged into a single document the user agent can work with. This document specifies rules for merging each of the XML elements defined. It should be noted that these merging rules are part of the semantics of the XML element. User agents implement the merging rules as part of implementing the element semantics. As a consequence, it is not possible to build an entity that can mechanically merge two session policy documents without understanding the semantics of all elements in the input documents.

Visual Studio 2008 Ships
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

Microsoft has released its Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 to manufacturing. The technology is available to MSDN subscribers. Company officials said Visual Studio 2008, codenamed Orcas, contains more than 250 new features and delivers significant enhancements in every edition, including Visual Studio Express and Visual Studio Team System to enable developers of all levels—from hobbyists to enterprise development teams to build applications. Among the improvements in the Orcas release is that Microsoft has made web development easier with new support for Web server communication techniques for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and JavaScript Object Notation (AJAX/JSON) enabled Web sites. Also, new ASP.NET controls allow for better page management and templates, and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) delivers native support for RSS and REST (Representational State Transfer). The .NET Framework 3.5 also delivers several new features, including capabilities for Web 2.0, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software plus Services-based applications. Workflow enabled services provide a new programming model classes that simplifies building workflow-enabled services by using Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation. This allows .Net Framework developers to build business logic for a service using Windows Workflow Foundation and expose messaging from that service using WCF. Microsoft also has placed additional Web services protocol support in WCF, including Web Services Atomic Transaction (WS-AtomicTransaction) 1.1, WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1, WS-SecureConversation, and Web Services Coordination (WS-Coordination) 1.1.

2^W: The Second Coming of the Web
T.V. Raman, Blog

I recently gave a talk entitled "What Comes After Web 2.0?" at the W3C Technical Plenary in Boston. The World Wide Web was built on the following architectural pieces: (1) HTTP: A simple client-server protocol; (2) HTML: A simple markup language for authoring hypertext; (3) URLs: A universal means of addressing Web content. Where Web 1.0 was about bringing useful content to the Web, Web 2.0 is about building Web artifacts out of Web parts. URLs play a central role in enabling such re-use—notice that a necessary and sufficient condition for something to exist on the Web is that it be addressable via a URL. A key consequence of this design is that Web artifacts when deployed on the Web themselves become an integral part of the Web and are ready to be re-used in building higher-level Web components. Illustrative examples: Google Search—Clearly, Google WebSearch would not exist without the Web. But notice that every Google Search in its turn has a URL; this makes it possible for hypertext documents across the Web to embed links to specific searches. Thus, not only is Google Search built on the Web; it itself becomes an integral part of the Web. Auctions—Items available on auction sites such as eBay are URL addressable. This again makes these an integral partof the Web. Online Shopping—When items in an online catalog have URLs, each item immediately becomes part of the Web. The overall impact of the above design is profound; by ensuring that everything that exists on the Web has a unique URL, we ensure that it becomes possible to construct higher-level Web artifacts out of existing Web parts. This is what has led to the success of mashups on the Web; notice that the typical Web mashup accesses a multiplicity of data sources via the relevant URLs to deliver an integrated view to the user. We look forward to the second coming of the Web where mashups are not limited to pairwise combinations of Web resources, but instead allow general composition of arbitrary combinations of Web resources.

Using XML and Jar Utility API to Build a Rule-Based Java EE Auto-Deployer
Colin (Chun) Lu, O'Reilly ONJava.com

Today's Java EE application deployment is a common task, but not an easy job. If you have ever been involved in deploying a Java EE application to a large enterprise environment, no doubt you have faced a number of challenges before you click the deploy button. For instance, you have to figure out how to configure JMS, data sources, database schemas, data migrations, third-party products like Documentum for web publishing, dependencies between components and their deployment order, and so on. Although most of today's application servers support application deployment through their administrative interfaces, the deployment task is still far from being a one-button action. In the first few sections of this article, the author discusses some of the challenges of Java EE deployment. Then he introduces an intelligent rule-based auto-deployer application, and explain how it can significantly reduce the complexity of Java EE system deployment. He also gives a comprehensive example showing how to build XML rules using XStream utility library, how to extend and analyze the standard Java EE packaging (EAR), and then perform a complex deployment task just by pushing one button. Adding a rule-based auto-deployer in your Java EE application deployment task has several benefits. It provides centralized and transacted deployment management: In a very large enterprise environment, applications are usually deployed on to hundreds of different systems. This deployer application provides a good mean of a centralized management. In addition, it can manage deployment as a transacted action by implementing un-deploy/re-deploy methods. Therefore, the deployer can rollback the deployment or switch to different version very easily.

See also: the XStream Library

Oracle Customers Like Compression, Storage Management, XML Handling
Charles Babcock, InformationWeek

Carlo Tiu, senior programmer analyst with Northern California Power Agency, works for an independent, "green" producer of hydro and geothermal power that also coordinates contributions to the state electrical grid from other independents. Its members include the cities of Palo Alto, Lodi, and Santa Clara, which run their own generating plants. One of 43,000 attendees at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, Tiu spoke about XML and XQuery. Tiu is overseeing the transformation of the agency's information exchange systems from hard-to-implement, point-to-point communications to one that captures and exchanges standardized XML data. To him, the XML DB capabilities built into the Oracle database are a lifesaver. For each producer, the agency must capture on a regular basis the amount of wholesale power it's supplying the grid and the value of that power. The data is captured in intervals throughout the day, resulting in large XML files that must be processed by the agency's system. The agency has designed XML schema for capturing the data and is sharing that design with the other suppliers as open source code. As more producers adopt it, it will become easier for coordinators to see what's going on within the state power distribution system. The agency's goal is not only to improve its own operations, but "to bring up the level of XML expertise in the electricity marketplace and reduce costs for all utilities." The Federal Energy Commission and the California Independent System Operator, a non-profit corporation, will require the use of XML data by suppliers in March of 2008. Oracle has supported XQuery since the 10g version came out. Oracle 11g released in July included more granular XML data storage and indexing, enhancements that make handling large amounts of XML data more efficient.

NETCONF Configuration Interface Advertisement with WSDL and XSD
Hideki Okita, Tomoyuki Iijima, et al (eds), IETF Internet Draft

An initial draft of "NETCONF Configuration Interface Advertisement with WSDL and XSD" has been released. IETF netconf WG made up NETCONF protocol as a standard configuration protocol between a network management system and network devices. By using this unified management/ configuration protocol, operators can reduce management/configuration cost. Developers of the network management system (NMS) read configuration interface definition document and write code that accesses the configuration interface of the NETCONF device. Now, there are no standard way to take XML Schema from a target NETCONF device. To implement the NETCONF NMS, the developers should check the Schema that defines the configuration data of the target NETCONF device. This memo describes a configuration interface advertisement method for NETCONF device developers. In the proposal, the developers take a configuration interface definition information of target NETCONF devices. On their development environment, they generate stab classes to control the devices. The NETCONF device advertises their configuration interface by a WSDL file. The WSDL file describes message type of each NETCONF operation of the device. The WSDL file contains XML Schema in its types element and describes definition of the types definition used to configuration data. By this configuration interface advertisement, Network management System (NMS) developers can improve their development efficiency of the NMS. The document provides the requirements to NETCONF devices and the programming model to suppress the implementation cost of the NMS that manages NETCONF devices. First, this document standardizes how to describe the configuration interface of NETCONF devices. Second, this document standardizes how to describe the type definition of the XML elements that occur in the NETCONF protocol messages. Last, this document standardizes how to advertise the above configuration interface definition information.


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