Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Tuesday, 04 December 2007

A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS and Sponsor Members
Edited by Robin Cover

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Headlines

W3C Issues XForms 1.1 Candidate Recommendation Call for Implementations
All Interface Technologies by Market Dominators Should be QA-ed, ZRAND Standards!
Alfresco Aligns With Adobe
No Searching for the Swicki: It's Here
Extensible Markup Language (XML) Format Extension for Representing Copy Control Attributes in Resource Lists
New XBRL Taxonomy a 'Boon to Investors'
Red Hat Announces Real-Time Additions to Linux
Intel Launches XML Suite Aimed at Enterprise SOA

W3C Issues XForms 1.1 Candidate Recommendation Call for Implementations
John M. Boyer (ed), W3C Technical Report

W3C announced that the Forms Working Group has published the Candidate Recommendation of XForms 1.1. XForms is an XML application that represents the next generation of forms for the Web. An XForms-based Web form gathers and processes XML data using an architecture that separates presentation, purpose and content. XForms is not a free-standing document type, but is intended to be integrated into other markup languages, such as XHTML, ODF, or SVG. XForms 1.1 refines the XML processing platform introduced in XForms 1.0 by adding several new submission capabilities, action handlers, utility functions, user interface improvements, and helpful datatypes as well as a more powerful action processing facility, including conditional, iterated and background execution, the ability to manipulate data arbitrarily and to access event context information. XForms accommodates form component reuse, fosters strong data type validation, eliminates unnecessary round-trips to the server, offers device independence and reduces the need for scripting. W3C publishes a Candidate Recommendation to indicate that the document is believed to be stable and to encourage implementation by the developer community. The W3C Forms Working Group expects to request that the Director advance this document to Proposed Recommendation once the Working Group has provided a test suite and an implementation report to demonstrate at least two interoperable implementations for each test of a required feature and at least one implementation for each test of a feature. The working group does not plan to request to advance to Proposed Recommendation prior to 14 February 2008 and expects sufficient implementation data will be available by 15 May 2008.

See also: on XForms 1.0 Third Edition

All Interface Technologies by Market Dominators Should be QA-ed, ZRAND Standards!
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Opinion

The trouble with standards is that there are not enough of them. There is a strong public interest in having the interface technologies of market dominators (which would include near monopolists and long-term super-profit-takers) out in the open, unencumbered, zero royalty, non-discriminatory licensed, and with the documentation QAed by an independent group which may include experts and rivals and stakeholders. And there is indeed a great system set up for this: ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. First, I should clear up a misunderstanding that many people fall into: a technical standard from ISO is not a regulation. According to ISO, It is always the adopter's responsibility to look at the available specifications and see which ones are useful, and in which contexts. Second, for ISO standards, multiple standards for the same area the norm not the exception. In fact: look at the dozens of standards for graphics formats, the multiple standards for programming languages, the multiple standards for operating systems, the multiple standards for schema languages and so on. Putting a proprietary standard through the standards mill does not prevent other rival technologies becoming standards, nor does it necessarily obsolete an existing standards. Standards are not a race... My key point is that once a company's success in an area brings it to the point of market domination (or long-term super-profit-taker) then anti-trust regulators need to ensure that their interface technologies are open enough for the usual level-playing field concerns to be addressed. It needs to be just a cost of doing business, once you reach a certain point.

Alfresco Aligns With Adobe
Chris Kanaracus, InfoWorld

Alfresco has updated its open-source content management platform, integrating it with services like iGoogle and MediaWiki. The release also features an integration with Adobe's Flex 2 Web development framework. The relationship with Flex is meant to encourage development of rich Internet applications on top of Alfresco. Alfresco gives its software away and makes money on support. It claims 20,000 installations, including among large enterprises such as Morgan Stanley. Microsoft has also positioned its competing product, SharePoint, as a social computing platform. Ian Howells (Alfresco chief marketing officer): "What we've pulled together is the de facto, standard tools people are already using... What we're doing is sort of giving you all the classic enterprise control, but in a social-networking platform. Customers can expect the platform to evolve fluidly; we've created an environment that enables us to integrate to other tools rapidly ... so we can innovate quickly, not in 12- to 18-month release cycles." Alfresco is building to a 3.0 release, likely in the first half of 2008.

See also: the Alfresco announcement

No Searching for the Swicki: It's Here
Clint Boulton, eWEEK

The Swicki (search-wiki) custom search tool arrives as a more socially-minded alternative to customized search from Google and Yahoo. The swicki, formally launched Dec. 4 by search software specialist Eurekster, is a custom search portal and social search widget. The software, free for consumers, also boasts new automation features to make building a swicki simpler. Users may customize a swicki search portal on any topic, choosing content from blogs, Web sites, images, video and RSS feeds, and share the widget to a community of users. However, instead of returning millions of results like a generic search engine, swickis "learn" from the search behavior of the community, theoretically making it easier for the next user to find what they're looking for. Here's how it works: Swickis scan the data indexed by multiple search feeds plus all additional sources specified by the swicki builder to provide relevant results. The swickis take into account keyword, clicks, votes and behavior recorded from every search, so the search results ranking constantly changes. Swickis also automatically update themselves based on the user's online behavior.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) Format Extension for Representing Copy Control Attributes in Resource Lists
Miguel A. Garcia-Martin and Gonzalo Camarillo (eds), IETF Internet Draft

The IESG announced that members of the IETF Session Initiation Proposal Investigation (SIPPING) Working Group have released a candidate Proposed Standard draft of "Extensible Markup Language (XML) Format Extension for Representing Copy Control Attributes in Resource Lists." The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits final comments on this action. In certain types of multimedia communications, a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) request is distributed to a group of SIP User Agents (UAs). The sender sends a single SIP request to a server which further distributes the request to the group. This SIP request contains a list of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), which identify the recipients of the SIP request. This URI-list is expressed as a resource list XML document. This specification defines an XML extension to the XML resource list format that allows the sender of the request to qualify a recipient with a copy control level similar to the copy control level of existing e-mail systems. It provides an extension that enables the sender to supply a copy control attribute that labels each recipient as a "to", "cc", or "bcc" recipient. This attribute indicates whether the recipient is receiving a primary copy of the SIP request, a carbon copy, or a blind carbon copy. Additionally, we provide the sender with the capability of indicating in the URI-list that one or more resources should be anonymized, so that some recipients' URIs are not disclosed to the other recipients. Instead, these URIs are replaced with anonymous URIs.

New XBRL Taxonomy a 'Boon to Investors'
Michael Hickins, eWEEK

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is releasing a new taxonomy for Extensible Business Reporting Language on December 4, 2007 in the hopes of improving financial reporting and analysis. An XBRL taxonomy, which is akin to an XML schema, describes a standard way to report business information. The SEC has been encouraging public companies to file their public financial disclosures using XBRL on a voluntary basis. David Blaszkowsky, director for the office of interactive disclosure at the SEC, said during an XBRL conference held in Vancouver, British Columbia, that the new taxonomy represents "a tremendous boon to investors" because it provides greater access to information buried in financial reports. Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, and one of the original architects of XML, said XBRL will allow financial services firms and individual investors to dive into public company statements more efficiently than they can now: "XBRL tries to make information machine-processable. The end result is that the language will make it trivial to run a comparison across an entire sector and get an answer in seconds." XBRL "is a powerful and flexible version of XML which has been defined specifically to meet the requirements of business and financial information. It enables unique identifying tags to be applied to items of financial data, such as 'net profit'. However, these are more than simple identifiers. They provide a range of information about the item, such as whether it is a monetary item, percentage or fraction. XBRL allows labels in any language to be applied to items, as well as accounting references or other subsidiary information."

See also: the XBRL web site

Red Hat Announces Real-Time Additions to Linux
Peter Judge, ZDNet UK

Open-source specialist Red Hat has launched a "real-time" addition to its Linux operating system, which it claims will make some features run 100 times faster than rival technologies. Red Hat's Messaging Real-time Grid (MRG) was launched as a beta on Tuesday [2007-12-04] with a full release in the first half of 2008. MRG is an addition to the open-source specialist's Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, and is designed for businesses such as banks that need to carry out transactions on their IT systems as instantaneously as possible, or "real-time". MRG includes message-queuing middleware, that allows applications to communicate with each other. It is the first commercial implementation of Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), an open-source system that [Red Hat VP Scott] Crenshaw claims is 100 times faster than competing proprietary products from Tibco and IBM... MRG is the first fruit of the vendor's Linux automation strategy announced last month which Red Hat applies to its efforts to simplify the building of enterprise infrastructure, for both users and software vendors. The other notable feature of the MRG platform is its grid capability, which will allow enterprise applications to "steal" spare processor cycles from Linux desktops.

See also: the press release

Intel Launches XML Suite Aimed at Enterprise SOA
Andy Dornan, NetworkComputing.com

Intel today announced that it is shipping the XML Software Suite, a set of libraries for Java and C++ that implement common XML functions such as parsing, schema validation and language transformation. Based on technology acquired with XML appliance maker Sarvega more than two years ago, the suite aims to boost performance of application servers and SOA middleware. Intel has previously used the Sarvega technology as a way to drive demand for its chips, but this launch looks like an aggressive move into software. It also signals a change in Intel's target customers: Whereas Intel previously aimed its technology mostly at OEMs, it now hopes to sell directly to enterprise customers too. Although Intel recommends that customers use hardware based its own Core microarchitecture, the suite will work with any 32- or 64-bit x86 chips. Intel's own performance comparisons are against other software, claiming improvement by a factor of two or better vs. open-source XML libraries included with GNOME and Apache. The real competitor is still specialist XML chipmaker Tarari, whose silicon is used in hardware acceleration appliances from vendors including Cisco Systems and Layer 7 Technologies. To a lesser extent, IBM plays in the same market, building its own XML chips for its own appliances. However, by selling to enterprises directly, Intel is also competing with the appliance makers themselves, something that could cause tensions with its own customers. According to Intel, the software's main advantage over hardware appliances is a full implementation of the JAXP (Java API for XML Processing) standard, allowing it to be used alongside existing applications without rewriting. However, this only applies to Java. There are no similar standards for C++. And although the software is available for Windows as well as Linux, it doesn't support.NET applications.


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