Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Monday, 11 February 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:
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

Headlines

Tibco Adds Eclipse, ESB to SOA Platform
XML at X; Film at XI
Scenes from a Recommendation 1: Chicago, Cafe des Artistes
Put to the Test: Nexaweb Enterprise Web Suite 2.0
Open-Source Movement Turns 10
Do We Really Need Structured Document Formats?
WSO2 Joining Open-Source SOA Registry Field
W3C's Excessive DTD Traffic
The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends

Cover Pages

New OASIS Standard: XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) v1.2

Tibco Adds Eclipse, ESB to SOA Platform
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Tibco Software is now shipping its ActiveMatrix 2.0 platform for managing SOA, featuring an Eclipse-based development environment and an enterprise service bus. The platform offers expanded capabilities for integration, composite application development, and governance, Tibco said. Users can build and manage SOA applications, supporting technologies such as Java, .Net, and service mediation. Applications can be built that combine services developed with disparate technologies and manage them via a single infrastructure. The platform features several components, including ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks, for integration, and ActiveMatrix Service Grid, for assembling services. New to the platform is ActiveMatrix Service Bus, for on-ramping services and implementing content or context-based routing. A common environment based on the Eclipse platform is provided for business analysts, architects, and developers for development and management. ActiveMatrix covers a spectrum of capabilities ranging from service virtualization, with developers able to build services in a tool of their choice, to governance and integration. With ActiveMatrix 2.0, Tibco seeks to help users manage large-scale SOA rollouts with a single platform. Much of the technical coding involved in service creation and deployment is replaced with configuration. Governance and management capabilities enable administrators to deploy applications and apply policies from a single console. Also featured is expanded support of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) specification to improve interoperability in deploying SOA.

See also: the announcement

XML at X; Film at XI
Eve Maler, Pushing String Blog

The original XML Recommendation is 10 years old today. Happy XML Day! These anniversaries feel a little artificial to me; my first clear memory of the XML work was a teleconference Jon Bosak had arranged among the "SGML on the Web Editorial Review Board" members in June (?) 1996, so for me XML is twelve and a half years old. As something of a birthday present, today I'm publishing something SGML-flavored that I hope may still be of use, or at least morbid interest, to modern XML practitioners. You see, I cowrote a book in the just-prior-to-XML era with another of my lifelong friends, Jeanne El Andaloussi, about SGML, in SGML. In DocBook, as a matter of fact. That methodology I mentioned above, with design principles and stuff? That came from this book. Now that the book is out of print, she and I discussed the matter, and we agreed to publish it here... You'll have to be the judge of how well the content has stood the test of time, but I can tell you the markup did beautifully. With a huge dollop of help from Norm Walsh (both his DocBook stylesheets and his mad skillz), the SGML-to-XML-to-HTML processing pipeline was downright trivial. Voila! We present to you (online): "Developing SGML DTDs: From Text to Model to Markup."

Scenes from a Recommendation 1: Chicago, Cafe des Artistes
Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Messages in a Bottle, MSM's klog

The XML spec became a W3C Recommendation ten years ago this week. Tim Bray has posted some character sketches from the period; Eve Maler has followed suit with some recollections (and an online version of Maler/El Andaloussi! Woo hoo!); this has inspired me to think about doing the same. What follows is the first in (what I hope will be) a series of moments I remember from the creation of XML. If you look, you can find a lot of stories about the beginning of XML. It surprised me, at first, that they all seem to be different; it surprised me even more to find some told in the first person by people whom I had not suspected of being involved with XML at all. But I shouldn't have been surprised. Scores or hundreds of people were involved in the development of XML, thousands in its spread and uptake. In some sense, then, XML will have had scores, or hundreds, or thousands of beginnings. Why should I think I know about them all? Questions like 'How did X start?' often mean not 'How did X start?' but 'How did you come to be involved in X?'—or, at least, that's how we answer them. The beginnings of XML? I don't know. But I'll tell you what I do know; I know when I first heard about it. The second WWW conference was in Chicago, in October 1994. With Bob Goldstein, one of my colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago computer center, I had submitted a paper on how the Web would achieve its true potential only once it had SGML awareness ('HTML to the Max')...

Put to the Test: Nexaweb Enterprise Web Suite 2.0
Nelson King, Intelligent Enterprise

When you investigate Nexaweb Enterprise Web Suite 2.0, you get a sense that it was created de novo by a group of smart people who studied the requirements for building robust, rich-Internet-application-style enterprise applications (like plenty of scalability, security, and data access), and who considered the available standards and commonly used tools (Java, JavaScript, Ajax, XML, SOA, etc.) They then set about piecing together what they viewed as a simpler, consistent, mostly familiar, and efficient whole. I tested the Nexaweb Platform in three server/hardware configurations and found the installations to be smooth, requiring surprisingly little post-install tweaking. Some of this is probably the result of using standards, coupled with relatively tight control of client, communication, and server. An interesting innovation is the use of Nexaweb XML to first create the data presentation UI and then, through a data framework plug-in, asynchronously handle the data going to or from the client. Ajax works this way and users find the approach more responsive. The data framework approach supports a wide variety of external data handlers in JSP, JSTL, Struts, XSTL, or MVC. Pre-built components are geared to Web 2.0, rich Internet application, SOA and mobile applications. Nexaweb includes the Internet Messaging Bus (IMB) as its way of providing these features and guaranteeing reliable messaging. Nexaweb keeps it simple, for example riding the http channel through port 80 so that it can be instantly compatible with most firewalls. Nexaweb supports a Universal Client Framework—which, despite the name, isn't all things to all developers, but it does make it possible for developers who prefer Java, JavaScript, or Ajax to work on Nexaweb apps. The hitch is that they must learn Nexaweb's declarative language, NXML (Nexaweb XML), to produce the UI and wrap the other code. In Nexaweb's case the DOM (Document Object Model) houses the NXML and provides the commands for the local browser.

Open-Source Movement Turns 10
Peter Galli, eWEEK

The past decade has been marked by enormous achievements and some serious setbacks, says Bruce Perens, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative. This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of the "Open Source Definition" and the public announcement of the formation of the Open Source Initiative. The decade has been marked both by enormous achievements and serious setbacks. "This was the first time that the general public heard what open source was about. Friday, February 8 is the last day of Decade Zero of open source, while Saturday, February 9 is the anniversary of open source and the start of Decade One. It's a computer scientist thing. We always start counting from zero," said Bruce Perens, creator of the Open Source Definition and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative. While acknowledging the trailblazing role of Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, Perens also acknowledged the conflict that has existed between open-source and free-software evangelism. "I always intended to have open source be another way of talking about free software, tailored to the ears of business people, that would eventually lead them to a greater appreciation of Richard Stallman's arguments on that front. This has come to pass, and I hope you'll continue to make it so," Perens said in a blog posting. From the blog: "We have actually changed the way that innovation happens. Innovation has gone public. Many companies, institutions, and individuals share innovation on a daily basis, entirely in the open, through Free Software development communities. The products they produce are the leaders in their field. Public innovation eliminates the high transaction costs of lawyers, lawsuits and licensing. It focuses on building a fertile community across the market for idea creation and utilization rather than dividing the market for the direct monetization of ideas as property. This is the economically most efficient approach for most companies."

See also: Bruce Perens' blog

Do We Really Need Structured Document Formats?
Eric Armstrong, Blog

Do we really need structured document formats? Structured document formats like DITA, DocBook, and Solbook are characterized by deeply nested tags and a multitude of schema constraints. Unstructured tagging languages like HTML, on the other hand, are wide open. In one meeting, every reason we came up with that made them seem necessary, was answered by a convincing counter argument. "Reuse" would seem to be the most important reason. And maybe there are some compelling cases. But maybe all-out reuse isn't needed. Maybe we really only need a very restricted form that solves those cases. In at least the case of version-dimension reuse, variable substitution and conditional metadata seem to be a darn good idea. And in at least the case of table and list tags, nesting seems to be a requirement. So it's clearly not the case that we can completely do without such capabilities. On the other hand, the counter arguments against other forms of variable substitution and conditional metadata remain intact—at times, it is just too costly to keep them working, especially in an environment that changes frequently. And nesting everything may well be overkill, when so few forms of nesting are actually indispensable. This post summarizes the arguments we considered. Do they demolish the case for structured documents in a highly fluid setting like the software industry? Do they demolish the case for structured documents and reuse? Are they wrong in some important respect? Or do they overlook some vitally important point that makes structured document formats irreplacable?

WSO2 Joining Open-Source SOA Registry Field
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Featuring SOA governance and Web 2.0 collaboration capabilities, WSO2 Registry offers a repository for storing information and a registry for locating it. A Web-based interface is included along with Web 2.0 features like tags, ratings, and comments systems. Users can store and manage enterprise metadata in a wiki-style model. WSO2's structured repository supports XML and SOA metadata formats along with arbitrary data, such as Microsoft Office documents, images, files, and text formats. A catalog of enterprise information can be built that includes services, service descriptions, employee data, and ongoing projects. "It's a registry and repository product, so it basically organizes and lets you store in a versioned and REST-compatible way all the SOA metadata that happens to be in your enterprise," said Glen Daniels, director of Java platforms at WSO2. Metadata can include service descriptions, XML schemas, and configuration data. The company follows MuleSource in announcing an open-source registry and repository for SOA. According to the announcement: "The WSO2 Registry supports several usage scenarios. First, it can be embedded in any Java application that needs a registry and repository to store resources with Web 2.0-style features for commenting, tagging and rating those resources. Second, it offers a REST-style Web API that allows the WSO2 Registry to be used remotely from any application from any language, including Java, PHP, C++, and Javascript. The Web API is built on the popular Atom and AtomPub protocols, allowing any feed reader (such as Google Reader or Bloglines reader) to browse the contents of the Registry. Finally, the WSO2 Registry comes with an attractive AJAX-powered user interface, which allows it to be used as a Web application by both business and technical users alike. The product can be used with the embedded database or be configured to use an existing database such as MySQL, Oracle or SQLServer..."

See also: the announcement

W3C's Excessive DTD Traffic
Gerald Oskoboiny and Ted Guild, W3C Systems Team Blog

If you view the source code of a typical web page, you are likely to see something like this near the top: "<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC..." These [statements] refer to HTML DTDs and namespace documents hosted on W3C's site. Note that these are not hyperlinks; these URIs are used for identification. This is a machine-readable way to say "this is HTML". In particular, software does not usually need to fetch these resources, and certainly does not need to fetch the same one over and over! Yet we receive a surprisingly large number of requests for such resources: up to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven't changed in years. The vast majority of these requests are from systems that are processing various types of markup (HTML, XML, XSLT, SVG) and in the process doing something like validating against a DTD or schema. Handling all these requests costs us considerably: servers, bandwidth and human time spent analyzing traffic patterns and devising methods to limit or block excessive new request patterns. We would much rather use these assets elsewhere, for example improving the software and services needed by W3C and the Web Community. You might think something like "don't request the same resource thousands of times a day, especially when it explicitly tells you it should be considered fresh for 90 days" would be obvious, but unfortunately it seems not. At the W3C Systems Team's request the W3C TAG has agreed to take up the issue of "Scalability of URI Access to Resources."

See also: the XML Catalogs standard

The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends
Sandy Kemsley, CMP Process Management Forum

Speaking at this week's Gartner BPM Summit in Las Vegas, Jay Simons, VP of Marketing for BEA, presented the company's recent research results on the state of the BPM market, including a survey of 200-plus BEA customers, mostly IT people but spread across vertical markets and geographies. They've also gathered information through their online BPM Lifecycle Assessment. The results show a number of interesting trends indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI over the next three years. (1) IT embraces BPM enterprisewide, which broadens the scope for BPM beyond the existing departmental systems, and centralizes the practices around BPM. In general, this is occurring because of the ability of BPM to connect applications into improved business processes; more than half already are or will be connecting BPM and SOA in their environment. (2) BPM is becoming event-driven, in order to support the event-driven nature of business today. This will result in much more agile processes that can respond to both expected and unexpected events. (3) Increased focus on knowledge-intensive processes, and using collaborative BPM to enable ad hoc processes both on their own or as an offshoot from a structured process... (4) Enterprise social computing: introducing tagging, wiki, social connectedness and the like with more traditional process management in order to add context and more easily collaborate. (5) Moving towards dynamic business applications; Yvonne Genovese spoke in this keynote about the move towards dynamic/composite applications in order to free organizations from the pre-canned logic in packaged enterprise applications, but BPM, together with services exposed in an SOA layer, allows for the fast assembly of applications that are more suited to current business needs.

Selected from the Cover Pages, by Robin Cover

New OASIS Standard: XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) v1.2

OASIS has announced the approval of the XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) specification Version 1.2 as an OASIS Standard. The specification was produced by members of the OASIS XML Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF) Technical Committee. The purpose of the XLIFF vocabulary is to store localizable data and carry it from one step of the localization process to the other, while allowing interoperability between tools. The specification is tool-neutral, supports the entire localization process, and supports common software, document data formats, and markup languages. The specification provides an extensibility mechanism to allow the development of tools compatible with an implementer's data formats and workflow requirements. The extensibility mechanism provides controlled inclusion of information not defined in the specification. The XLIFF file format serves as a container for externalized data to be interchanged between software publishers, documentation writers (including, but not limited to documents written in DITA, Docbook, HTML, and other XML document formats), localization tools, and software services providers in order to facilitate all the phases of the localization process.


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