Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Thursday, 28 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:
BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com

Headlines

OGF-Europe: Europe Backs Open Standards to Advance Grid Adoption
Test Center Preview: The Open Handset Alliance's Android SDK
Update: URI Declaration Versus Use
Proposal for Unstructured Operation Markup Language eXtended (UOML-X) TC
Do-Ocracy and the Apache Web Services Stack Comparison
Optimizing Federated Presence with View Sharing
Hermes Messaging Gateway v2.0 (H2O) Testing Server

OGF-Europe: Europe Backs Open Standards to Advance Grid Adoption
Staff, Open Grid Forum Announcement

The Open Grid Forum has announced the creation of OGF-Europe, funded by the European Commission for Mobilizing and Integrating Communities on Grid Standards & Best Practices Globally. OGF-Europe will capitalize on European Commission investments in grid technologies by driving grid adoption and innovation across Europe in research, government and industry. The OGF-Europe project is aligned with OGF's global mission of pervasive grid adoption through interoperable software standards. Key deliverables include outreach seminars and workshops, adoption challenges and recommendations reports; community surveys, best practice reports and tutorials. OGF-Europe will also co-ordinate an Industry Experts council to better understand how European enterprises are dealing with issues surrounding interoperations and standardisation and to engage them in the core work of OGF. OGF-Europe is led by Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), technically co-ordinated by OGF.eeig, and consists of eight other partners aiming to achieve its ambitious goals. OGF is the international community dedicated to accelerating grid adoption to enable business value and scientific discovery by providing an open forum for grid innovation and developing open standards for grid software interoperability.

Test Center Preview: The Open Handset Alliance's Android SDK
Rick Grehan, InfoWorld Software Review

Android is Google's foray into the handheld OS realm. It follows a path trodden by—among others—Symbian's Quartz, the SavaJe operating system, and J2ME. In fact, one of Android's stated goals is to overcome some of J2ME's shortcomings. Whether or not Android succeeds, either at that specific goal, or in general, remains to be seen. This article addresses a specific question: What is it like to work with the Android SDK? And to a lesser extent: What is under the Android hood? Peel away Android's carapace, dig down to its marrow, and you'll find a Linux kernel. Libraries are a layer above, a variety of frameworks above that, and a final layer of applications sits on the top. The library layer is home to code for entities such as media processors for playback and recording of audio and video, the core of the Web browser, font rendering, and the SQLite relational database engine... Hard-core developers will be satisfied to work solely with the collection of command-line tools that come with the SDK. For example, the activityCreator tool—which is provided as a batch file for Windows, and as a Python script for Mac and Linux users—will construct the framework for an Android Activity. Executing activityCreator will build skeletal Java files, create the Android project's required subdirectories, and build the necessary manifest XML files. The tool also creates an Ant script file for compiling the source and building the application... The Eclipse plug-in handles compilation, conversion to dex, launching the emulator, and downloading the application. Because writing Android code is writing Java code, the editor behaves as it would were you constructing an ordinary Java application. Resource files, which are written in XML, are easily managed by XML editors already available in Eclipse. Debugging is likewise supported from within Eclipse, and Android opens a debug perspective that anyone already familiar with Eclipse will be comfortable with... The Android SDK is a wonderful example of what can be done with open source applications and tools. When the SDK's parts work, they work reasonably well. However, at this point, would-be Android developers must be willing to assist in debugging the development platform itself; it's still pretty rough.

See also: Android SDK code web site

Update: URI Declaration Versus Use
David Booth, Community Contribution on Resource Identification

Testimony to the enduring debate about use of URIs to identify (non-information) resources: David Booth announced a substantial revision and expansion of his write-up on URI declarations "URI Declaration Versus Use." Abstract: "A URI declaration permits assertions about a URI's associated resource to be classified into two groups: core assertions, whch are provided by the URI declaration, and ancillary assertions, which are all others. This distinction enables different parties to share a common understanding of the associated resource (by accepting the core assertions) while making different choices about which ancillary assertions to accept. This paper defines these concepts and proposes some related best practices and a Web architectural rule specifying how URIs for non-information resources can be conveniently declared using existing hash or hashless (303-redirect) URI mechanisms."

See also: the TAG list discussion

Proposal for Unstructured Operation Markup Language eXtended (UOML-X) TC
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS announced the publication of a Proposed Charter for an OASIS Technical Committee to be named the "OASIS Unstructured Operation Markup Language eXtended (UOML-X) TC." The purpose of this TC is to carry on the existing OASIS UOML TC's goal of developing and maintaining the XML-based operation interface standard for unstructured documents. The Unstructured Operation Markup Language specification will define an XML schema for universal document operations. The schema is suitable for operating printable documents, including create, view, modify, and query information, that can be printed on paper, e.g. books, magazine, newspaper, office documents, maps, drawings, blueprints, but is not restricted to these kinds of documents. There are several commercial and free applications available based on the current draft of UOML, with more currently under development. The UOML specification will be composed of several parts. First part describes operations that should be used to create, read, write, edit, display/print document. The other parts describe operations for security control (include DRM), query, document organizing etc., depend on the decision of this TC. Developers and users of office application and document formatting specifications such as the OASIS OpenDocument Format ("ODF") may also find UOML useful. However, UOML addresses a different set of functions. The proposed UOML specification will operate on layout-based formatting information, rather than content-based formatting information (such as ODF). UOML will limit its functions to abstracting data from paper form, and defines an operation interface, rather than a file storage format. The new TC will operate under the RF on RAND Mode under the OASIS IPR Policy; the existing UOML TC operates under the RAND Mode of the OASIS IPR Policy.

See also: the OASIS UOML TC

Do-Ocracy and the Apache Web Services Stack Comparison
Paul Fremantle, Blog

Or: "Why I'm not personally responsible for the completeness of the web." I recently pointed a group of people to the Web Services Stack Comparison page on the Apache wiki. This is a page that has been edited by a bunch of people from different Web Services projects, but not me personally. Its almost certainly not completely up-to-date—because the projects change rapidly—but its a still a useful resource, and being a wiki has the benefit that people from different projects can update it with their own details. This might be the most accurate available comparison—just because its self-edited. But the page isn't complete: it also has no entries for Spring Web Services, ZSI, SOAP4R, PHP5, or a host of other Web Services stacks. It doesn't have entries for the WSO2 stacks either: WSF/C, WSF/PHP, WSF/Ruby, etc. Why am I telling you this? Because someone took offense at my referencing this incomplete page. So guess what? I suggested they or someone from CXF updated it. Yes: its a wiki! That's how they work. If you look at the edit history for this page you will see that people from Apache, Sun, Oracle and elsewhere have all added their own details. The wiki culture is very similar to the Open Source culture. If you want something done, just do it. Its called a "do-ocracy" - the power is with the people who actually write the code, do the work and make the changes. Its probably the biggest shock to people in traditional hierarchical organizations.

Optimizing Federated Presence with View Sharing
Jonathan Rosenberg, Steve Donovan, Kathleen McMurry; IETF Internet Draft

Members of the SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) Working Group have released an initial Internet Draft for "Optimizing Federated Presence with View Sharing." Presence federation refers to the exchange of presence information between systems. One of the primary challenges in presence federation is scale. With a large number of watchers in one domain obtaining presence for many presentities in another, the amount of notification traffic is large. This document describes an extension to the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) event framework, called view sharing. View sharing can substantially reduce the amount of traffic, but requires a certain level of trust between domains. View sharing allows the amount of presence traffic between domains to achieve the theoretical lower bound on information exchange in any presence system. The key idea with view sharing is that when there are many watchers in a domain to a single presentity in another domain, each of which is actually going to get the exact same presence document, the domain of the watchers extends a single subscription to the domain of the presentity, and the domain of the presentity sends a single copy of the presence document back to the domain of the watcher. In the case of a pair of large providers that are peering with each other, this mechanism can result in a significant savings. The ACL document informs a watching domain of the set of views that can be received by that domain, and associates specific watchers with specific views. An ACL document is an XML document that must be well-formed and must be valid according to schemas, including extension schemas, available to the validater and applicable to the XML document (see XML Schemas in Section 5.5). ACL documents must be based on XML 1.0 and must be encoded using UTF-8. The SIMPLE WG was chatered to develop an architecture for the implementation of a traditional buddylist-based instant messaging and presence application with SIP. Included might be new mechanisms for message confirmation delivery, indications for when a party is in the process of typing a message, secure buddylist manipulation operations, and the extension of the CPIM presence format to describe typical IM states.

See also: the IETF SIMPLE WG Charter

Hermes Messaging Gateway v2.0 (H2O) Testing Server
Patrick Yee, CECID Announcement

The Center for E-Commerce Infrastructure Development (CECID) at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) has contributed Hermes Messaging Gateway v2.0 (H2O) testing server for free to facilitate users to conduct self-service testing after its installation. The Hermes Messaging Gateway was developed as a platform for execution of common public standards, like ebMS and AS2, to deliver a secure and reliable information transfer. H2O operates as a Java web application. The ebMS and AS2 messaging capabilities are operated by the corresponding plug-in, written according to the H2O SPA specification. The messaging operation requires a database with JDBC connectivity in keeping track of the messaging status. H2O has open endpoints, and the enterprise backend applications can invoke H2O's Web Services for message delivery. The message delivery can be secured by using SSL or e-certificates, which conforms the public standards. Since its release at CECID open-source community website in June 2007, H2O has been downloaded and adopted by developers and users from over 60 economies around the world. Overwhelming responses and valuable feedback are received daily via a mailing list and the community website, in which some users reported that they experienced difficulties in setting up the appropriate configuration during installation, and finding partners for testing. In response to these comments related to H2O installation, a testing server which serves as a virtual testing machine is being setup at the community website to facilitate users to troubleshoot installation problems and conduct self-service testing on network connectivity to the Internet and message exchange functions. The H2O testing server (a.k.a. Swallow) is a web-based platform for testing messaging functionality of any client installed with H2O. It acts as a standardized, user-friendly, and comprehensive testing suite for users to test and learn how to use H2O practically. At Swallow, a user interface is provided to create an interoperability profile. After setting up, users can send their testing messages from their message gateway to Swallow. In turn, Swallow will send responses back to the users' message gateway, notifying them the message status and reporting error messages if any. All these network data is captured and displayed at Swallow's web interface for ease of monitoring the message connectivity. In short, Swallow helps users to install H2O more effectively and provides an Internet-based host to test their H2O deployment in a holistic way.

See also: the CECID web site


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