Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Monday, 28 January 2008

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

Progress Software Adds Cross-Process Visibility with Actional 7.1
Will HP's Extended GIF Partnership Help With SOA Interoperability?
Validator for XML Schema: XSV Version 3.1.1
Battle on Microsoft Standard Push
WSO2 Injects Mashups Into The Enterprise
ILOG Updates Rules; Now Supports .NET 3.0 and WCF
MarkLogic Server Used in Princeton Theological Seminary Digital Library

Progress Software Adds Cross-Process Visibility with Actional 7.1
Dana Gardner, ZDNet Blogs

Progress Software has beefed up its Actional SOA management offerings with the release of Progress Actional 7.1, which provides unified visibility into business processes, and connects those business processes to the underlying SOA infrastructure. Key features of the latest release include an automatic discovery feature that keeps information accurate, allowing users to compare how processes change from day to day. User can also set thresholds for alters about behavior and performance, and policy enforcement will automatically adjust when services or processes change. Progress, Bedford, Mass., added the Actional product line to its SOA arsenal just a little over two years ago with the acquisition of Actional Corporation in a $32-million deal. Progress said that Actional 7.1 will integrate with Lombardi TeamWorks, and the company plans to provide native support for other business-process management (BPM) solutions, including offerings from Software AG and Fujitsu. Actional also includes a software development kit (SDK) that allows third parties to add support for other BPM and SOA infrastructure products. The new version also includes support for non-XML payload data, which is designed to allow users to inspect and analyze message content in such existing services as Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and Enterprise JavaBean (EJB).

See also: InfoWorld

Will HP's Extended GIF Partnership Help With SOA Interoperability?
Andy Dornan, Network Computing

HP today launched new versions of Systinet and SOA Manager, adding new features aimed at run-time governance " enforcing the policies that traditional design-time registries and repositories define. It is also announcing a large expansion of its Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF), a set of specifications that smooth links between the registry or repository and other components. The expansion of GIF is largely through ten new partners, all of whom will support the spec. The single most important new partner is Oracle, which is already a major player in SOA and set to become moreso with its acquisition of BEA, already a GIF member. The most interesting looks like LogicLibrary, a specialist registry/repository vendor and Systinet competitor. Its support turns GIF from what had been a Systinet-centric program into something more vendor neutral. Most of the XML security gateway industry have also joined the GIF program: HP is announcing support form Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Vordel and Layer 7 Technologies, which leaves IBM DataPower the only major player in XML security that's not involved. The other four new members are orchestration specialist Active Endpoints and Web 2.0 development tool vendors JackBe, Nexaweb and Sonoa Systems, which could help to bridge the gap between rich Internet applications and SOA back end systems. But not everyone has embraced GIF. The main competitor is SOA Link, a similar program started by Infravio before it was acquired by webMethods and then Software AG. HP's new software (Systinet 2.52 and SOA Manager 2.5) tries to close the loop between design-time governance and run-time management, something several other vendors are working on.

See also: the HP press kit

Validator for XML Schema: XSV Version 3.1.1
Henry S. Thompson, Software Announcement

Henry S. Thompson (W3C Technical Advisory Group; HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh) announced the release of a vew version of the XML Schema Validator (XSV). XSV is an open source (GPLed) work-in-progress attempt at a conformant schema-aware processor, as defined by XML Schema Part 1: Structures, Second Edition of 28-October-2004. The simplest way to use XSV is via a form-based interface on the web. There is a Win32 one-click installation, and source distributions are available for the more adventurous. All installers are now up-to-date: Windoz executable, .deb, .rpm and source versions. The major changes since the last public release are: (1) corner cases for nested numeric exponents are handled correctly; (2) XSV no longer requires PyLTXML (our fast Python/C XML parser), will run without it, provided you have PyXML installed. XSV can be run with various flags to control the kind and level of validation. If you enter more than one URI, the second etc. will be used to schema-validate the document at the first URI. "Show Warnings" will display warning messages, e.g. about use of wildcards "Keep Going" enables continuation of schema-validation after finding errors. Check as complete schema: Normally XSV interprets its first input as a document to be validated, and the remaining inputs, if any, as schema documents for use in that validation. This means that if the only input is a schema document, XSV normally just validates that document against the Schema for Schema Documents (XMLSchema.xsd), but does not also check the Schema REC's constraints on the corresponding schema. Ticking the "Check as complete schema" box causes XSV to treat all its inputs as schema documents, check them against the Schema for Schema Documents and check the Schema REC's constraints on the corresponding schema.

Battle on Microsoft Standard Push
Karen Dearne, Australian IT

A global war has broken out over Microsoft's bid to make the XML document format used in Office 2007 an international standard. Rivals and the open-source community fear a yes vote for Office Open XML will stymie the existing ISO file standard, OpenDocument Format, and give Microsoft an ongoing commercial advantage. The file format standard is a key factor in ensuring present and future access to digital documents used by business or held in archives. The aim is to ensure backward-compatibility despite changes in software and publishing technologies. The software giant has been trying to secure national votes for a coming ISO ballot on OOXML, after the first ballot failed last September. IBM has been particularly outspoken about the issue, but local government programs executive Kaaren Koomen insists it's not simply a battle between two multinationals. "ISO has a policy that, wherever possible, there should only be one standard to maximise interoperability and functionality. We have an international standard for digital documentation, ODF, which was developed by Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Oracle and the open-source community some years back. Microsoft pulled out of that process and decided to develop its own standard, OOXML. Now Microsoft is trying to convince the rest of the ICT community to adopt its standard." Microsoft Australia chief technology officer Greg Stone says the company was simply responding to repeated requests to make its specification available. Rick Jelliffe, a developer of XML-based desktop tools and a long-standing participant in standards work, says the bottom line for Microsoft is keeping in the game. "This is really important for them. My take is that over the past 10 years Microsoft has lost its bread-and-butter systems integrator market. It had a thriving sector that was devoted and tied to it, but the advent of web technologies meant the old advantages of lock-in to proprietary formats suddenly became disadvantages, because you can't integrate with other systems."

WSO2 Injects Mashups Into The Enterprise
Charles Babcock, InformationWeek

WSO2's Mashup Server draws together a variety of enterprise information or services and allows them to be combined into a new application or "mashup." Mashups are typically associated with end user applications that make use of information or services readily available on the Web, such as an apartment-hunting application that taps intoGoogle Maps. WSO2 is extending the mashup idea to inside the enterprise. Any internal information or service that can be presented as a Web service may be found by Mashup Server and utilized as part of a new application, said Jonathan Marsh, WSO2 director of mashup technologies. Mashup Server relies on the popular Javascript language to define what resources are going to be tapped for a new application. Mashup Server includes an administrative user interface where Javascript can be used to identify and sequence services. But its Javascript may also be written wherever the developer prefers to compose it, which could include a simple text editor or an established integrated development environment, then imported into the Mashup Server, said Marsh. The WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus is an integration broker meant to serve as a basis for building out services oriented architecture. Its built on top of Synapse, an Apache incubator project that translates between applications and provides automatic routing of XML messages. Mashup Server can discover new services and capture information about them, which it stores for use in future mash-ups WSO2 Mashup Server is released under the Apache License Version 2.0. It features: (1) support for consuming and deploying services using dynamic scripting languages; (2) trivial deployment and redeployment; (3) automatic and UI-based generation of Web services artifacts—e.g. wsdl, schema, policy; (4) a set of gateways into a variety of information sources, including SOAP and POX/REST Web services, as well as plain old Web pages; (5) human-consumable results through a variety of user interfaces including Web pages, portals, e-mail, Instant Messenger service, Short Message Service (SMS), etc.

ILOG Updates Rules; Now Supports .NET 3.0 and WCF
Staff, DDJ

ILOG has announced its ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0, a tool that lets you edit and manage business rules in Microsoft Word and Excel through a new "Rules" tab in the Office 2007 toolbar or "ribbon". ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0 also provides support for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Microsoft's unified programming model for building service-oriented (SOA) applications. Debuting with this release, ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0 has a modular architecture similar to its sister product, ILOG JRules, for Java. These modules include a dedicated rule authoring environment for business users called "Rule Solutions for Office." Other features include: (1) Portable Rule Editing Environment for Business users. Rule Solutions for Office and Rule Team Server for SharePoint Services combined to promote a document-centric approach to rule management, leveraging new features in Office 2007. Users collaborate easily, taking rules where Word documents go—disconnected, routed, attached, and printed. (2) Out-of-the-box SOA deployment using Rule Execution Server for .NET. Traditionally, SOA investments have been expensive. (3) Enhanced Rule Management for Business Analysts. Business analysts can more easily collaborate with developers working on a common set of rules in their familiar environment. (4) Enhanced performance with RetePlus and FastPath available for the first time on .NET Framework. In this version, ILOG is introducing RetePlus and sequential execution with FastPath for .NET platform. The combination of RetePlus and FastPath in ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0 eliminates the need for a customer to compromise when selecting an algorithm.

See also: the product description

MarkLogic Server Used in Princeton Theological Seminary Digital Library
Staff, MarkLogic Announcement

Mark Logic Corporation announced that Princeton Theological Seminary has implemented MarkLogic Server as the new basis for the library's new digital collection. The library has launched a system for publishing digital content to give users better access to and navigation through more than 100,000 digital objects, including digitized representations of historic photographs, portraits, artifacts, and journals. This provides library members—both seminary students pursuing advanced degrees in divinity or theology, as well as the general public—with new levels of access and interactivity with historical and modern theological works. The Seminary Library implemented MarkLogic Server to enhance the library's existing browsing services with search and faceted navigation including the Web 2.0 concept of user-tagging. Based on a model of tag clouds, users apply key words to items in the digital archive, which are then able to be used as search tools or for browsing via faceted navigation. The digital collection is divided into visual collections and textual collections. Mark Logic replaced the existing digital collections infrastructure and provided a fixed, index-based navigation of individual and multipart digital works which have been scanned from a wealth of content related to the history of Princeton Seminary. The index and holding metadata are stored in the metadata encoding and transcription standard (METS), a library metadata XML standard developed by the Library of Congress. The METS XML files describe books and journals consisting of 100s of pages of content. Previously, access to the collection would result in interminable wait times, often with the browser simply timing out. Using MarkLogic, the Seminary Library can run these queries in XQuery, returning results on these large XML files often in less than a second and never more than three seconds.

See also: the library collections


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