Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Monday, 10 March 2008

A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
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Edited by Robin Cover

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Headlines

Web Security Experience, Indicators and Trust: Scope and Use Cases
Improving Performance of Healthcare Systems with SOA
Services-Based Enterprise Integration Patterns Made Easy, Part 2
Surveys from BPTrends and BEA Reflect on 'The State of BPM in 2008'
Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) Resolution Version 2.0
IDS Scheer Supports OASIS Reference Model, ARIS SOA Architect
NETCONF Configuration Interface Advertisement with WSDL and XSD
Mozilla's Firefox 3, Beta 4 Faster, Touts UI Changes, Vista Integration

Web Security Experience, Indicators and Trust: Scope and Use Cases
Tyler Close (ed), W3C Working Group Note

W3C has announced an update from the Web Security Context Working Group in the form of a published Note "Web Security Experience, Indicators and Trust: Scope and Use Cases." Web user agents are now used to engage in a great variety and number of commercial and personal activities. Though the medium for these activities has changed, the potential for fraud has not. The W3C Web Security Context Working Group, as part of the Security Activity, was chartered to recommend user interfaces that help users make trust decisions on the Web. The updated Note explains the group's technical aims, complementing the WG charter. It explains what the group aims to achieve, what technologies may be used, and how proposals will be evaluated. This elaboration is limited to the group's technical work and does not cover additional activities the group intends to engage in, such as ongoing outreach and education. The work outlined in the document is expected to take existing standards and best practices into account; where relevant, such existing work will be leveraged. (1) Security information within the Working Group's scope will be catalogued, along with corresponding presentations and user interpretations reported in user studies. (2) Members will analyze common use cases to determine what security information the user needs to safely accomplish their current task and recommend security information that should, or should not, be presented in each case. (3) The WG will recommend a set of terms, indicators and metaphors for consistent presentation of security information to users, across all web user agents. For each of these items, the Working Group will describe the intended user interpretation, as well as safe actions the user may respond with in common use cases. (4) Group members will recommend presentation techniques that integrate the consumption of security information by the user into the normal browsing workflow. Presenting security information in a way that is typically ignored by the user is of little value. (5) The Working Group will recommend presentation techniques that mitigate deceptive imitation, or hiding, of the user agent's presentation of security information.

Improving Performance of Healthcare Systems with SOA
Girish Juneja, Blake Dournaee, et al., InfoQueue

Healthcare organizations today are challenged to manage a growing portfolio of systems. The cost of acquiring, integrating, and maintaining these systems are rising, while the demands of system users are increasing. Organizations must address evolving clinical requirements as well as support revenue cycle and administration business functions. In addition, demands are increasing for interoperability with other organizations to regionally support care delivery. Service oriented architecture offers system design and management principles that support reuse and sharing of system resources across the healthcare organization. SOA does not require the re-engineering of existing systems. With SOA, existing processing can be combined with new capabilities to build a library of services that are used as a part of solutions. Using shared services that are aligned with business processes, SOA strengthens interoperability while reducing the need to synchronize data between isolated systems. Services may be made available, no matter their location, to create solutions that reach beyond the desktop, the department, and the healthcare organization.

Services-Based Enterprise Integration Patterns Made Easy, Part 2
Waseem Roshen, IBM developerWorks

This serial article presents some of the central concepts and features of enterprise integration patterns, introducing several basic concepts and features involved in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Part 1 and Part 2 of this series describe the basic concepts essential for understanding a services-based integration pattern. These concepts include loose coupling, code reuse and layering, language and platform independence, language independent interface, the idea of discovering a remote object at run time, invoking methods remotely, and asynchronous messaging for scalability. To improve on RPC functionality, two methods are used: (1) Distributed objects, also known as the Object Request Broker (ORB): This approach focuses on code reuse and language independence. (2) Asynchronous messaging: This approach addresses the problem of tight coupling between applications. In addition to introducing the benefits of object orientation, such as inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation, CORBA introduced a number of new features. Probably the most important was the concept of ORB, which extracted the code for marshaling input and output arguments and the code for communication from the client and server applications into a separate software component. In addition, ORB provides a facility to get a reference to a remote object so that methods can be invoked on that remote object. This separation let the same code be reused by many applications and allowed a certain amount of decoupling between the applications by moving away from point-to-point integration. This move away from point-to-point integration may be considered the first step in the evolution of the concept of ESB. A parallel development based on asynchronous messaging contains the seeds for the development of another type of ESB. This type of ESB provides a more scalable solution than the ESB type based on ORB. In asynchronous messaging, the client or client object sends a message to the target application, but doesn't wait for the response to continue its work. This leads to a certain amount of decoupling between the applications involved. Thus asynchronous messaging may be employed as the integration basis if high transaction volumes are expected. In messaging, the applications don't communicate with each other directly and don't have a dedicated communication link established between them. Instead, they communicate indirectly through queues. A central message broker can receive messages from different applications, determine the correct destination for each message type, and route the message to the appropriate destination application. This lets applications communicate with each other without knowing the location of the receiving applications.

See also: Part 1

Surveys from BPTrends and BEA Reflect on 'The State of BPM in 2008'
Jean-Jacques Dubray, InfoQueue

In the past couple of weeks, two major reports on "The State of BPM in 2008" were published. The first one (54 pages) was based on a survey filled by 274 respondents and published by Paul Harmon and Celia Wolf, Executive Editor and Publisher of BPTrends.com. The second one (36 pages) was based on analyst reports, articles and a survey of customers and was published by BEA with Sandy Kemsley as a co-author. BPTrends reports that a wide variety of process standards are being used by the respondents. However, BPMN shows the strongest momentum with 41% (from 22% in 2006) and BPEL showing a modest progression with 26 % (from 23% in 2006). XPDL (6%) and the OMG Process Metamodel (7%) are far behind while UML (30%) and CMM/CMMI (28%) remain fairly stable. The most popular tools to capture business processes remained Visio and PowerPoint. The respondents deployed a wide spectrum of BPMS suites with a prominence of the leading SOA infrastructure vendors: IBM (including FileNet), SAP, and Oracle.

Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) Resolution Version 2.0
Gabe Wachob, Drummond Reed (et al., eds), OASIS Committee Draft

OASIS announced the release of an approved Committee Draft 03 of "Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) Resolution Version 2.0" for fifteen-day public review 26-March-2008. The Relax-NG schema files referenced normatively in the prose specification document are also available separately. Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) provides a uniform syntax for abstract structured identifiers. Because XRIs may be used across a wide variety of communities and applications (as Web addresses, database keys, filenames, object IDs, XML IDs, tags, etc.), no single resolution mechanism may prove appropriate for all XRIs. However, in the interest of promoting interoperability, this specification defines a simple generic resource description format called XRDS (Extensible Resource Descriptor Sequence), a standard protocol for requesting XRDS documents using HTTP(S) URIs, and standard protocol for resolving XRIs using XRDS documents and HTTP(S) URIs. Both generic and trusted versions of the XRI resolution protocol are defined (the latter using HTTPS (RFC 2818) and/or signed SAML assertions. In addition, an HTTP(S) proxy resolution service is specified both to provide network-based resolution services and for backwards compatibility with existing HTTP(S) infrastructure. Resolution is the function of dereferencing an identifier to a set of metadata describing the identified resource. For example, in DNS, a domain name is typically resolved using the UDP protocol into a set of resource records describing a host. If the resolver does not have the answer cached, it will start by querying one of the well-known DNS root nameservers for the fully qualified domain name. Since domain names work from right to left, and the root nameservers know only about top level domains, they will return the NS (name server) records for the top-level domain. The resolver will then repeat the same query to those name servers and 'walk down the tree' until the domain name is fully resolved or an error is encountered. A simple non-recursing resolver will rely on a recursing nameserver to do this work. For example, it will send a query for the fully qualified domain name docs.oasis-open.org to a local nameserver. If the nameserver doesn't have the answer cached, it will resolve the domain name and return the results back to the resolver (and cache the results for subsequent queries). XRI resolution follows this same architecture except at a higher level of abstraction, i.e., rather than using UDP to resolve a domain name into a text-based resource descriptor, it uses HTTP(S) to resolve an XRI into an XML-based resource descriptor called an XRDS document.

See also: the announcement

IDS Scheer Supports OASIS Reference Model, ARIS SOA Architect
Staff, IDS Scheer Announcement

IDS Scheer has announced support for the OASIS SOA Reference Model used in tandem with ARIS SOA Architect. The structure and management of a business process-oriented service landscape requires close cooperation between specialized departments and IT within companies. IDS Scheer has leveraged its expanded methodology for Business-Driven SOA into developing comprehensive support for describing, planning and managing services—designed specifically for this type of collaboration within an organization. The new methodology, based on the OASIS SOA Reference Model, categorizes services using business criteria with a concentration on those with the greatest strategic importance—the end result is mitigation of risks within SOA projects. SOA projects are designed to help companies become more flexible to react efficiently to changes in the market. With the new reference model, these projects can now be achieved directly without moving from pillar to post because the development and management of the services work in conjunction with the relevant business unit. The technical specification of individual services within a SOA is a new feature and it ensures the continuing provision of target-oriented service development in IT and subsequent service reuse. This methodology is fully integrated into ARIS SOA Architect. Existing models for describing IT landscapes and web services can be reused, thus securing investments and enabling service orientation and Enterprise Architecture measures to work together. ARIS SOA Architect reduces implementation costs considerably because redundant implementations within a service are compiled, thereby producing an efficient service architecture. If a service fails, alternative implementations can be identified with ease.

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

Members of the IETF Network Configuration (NETCONF) Working Group have released "NETCONF Configuration Interface Advertisement with WSDL and XSD" as an updated I-D. This IETF Working Group has created the 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. The updated 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.

Mozilla's Firefox 3, Beta 4 Faster, Touts UI Changes, Vista Integration
Larry Dignan, ZDNet News

Mozilla says that the fourth beta of its Firefox 3 browser is available to download with more than 900 enhancements, better handling of memory and interface tweaks for Vista. Among the key features: (1) Improved memory usage: Mozilla says 'several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 Beta 4 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.' (2) More personalization—via an algorithm in the location bar that tracks site visit (visit recency and frequency); the aim is to better match URLs with your history and bookmarks; the algorithm adapts to your browsing habits; (3) Better search support in the download manager; (4) Full page zoom allows you to scale layout, text and images; (5) Integration with Vista and specific icons to go along with it; integration with Mac OS and Linux too; (6) Support for offline data storage for Web applications; (7) Tweaks to the JavaScript engine: the optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions.


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