Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Wednesday, 02 April 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

Approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an International Standard
Using the Eclipse BPEL Plug-In for WS-BPEL V2.0 Business Processes
Open Web SSO Project - Build 4
OASIS Open Reputation Management Systems (ORMS) Technical Committee
Facebook Meets .Net
IONA Becomes Silver Sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation

Approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an International Standard
Staff, International Organization for Standardization Announcement

"'ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology—Office Open XML File Formats', has received the necessary number of votes for approval as an ISO/IEC International Standard... The Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) was held in Geneva during the week 25-29 February 2008. By eliminating redundancies, the comments had been reduced to just over 1,000 individual issues to be considered. Issues considered as priorities by national members (such as accessibility, date formats, conformance issues) were discussed, and the other comments were addressed through a voting process on the remaining items, a system agreed by the BRM participants. The issues addressed and revised have resulted in sufficient national bodies withdrawing their earlier disapproval votes, or transforming them into positive votes, so that the criteria for approval of the document as an International Standard have now been met. Subject to there being no formal appeals from ISO/IEC national bodies in the next two months, the International Standard will accordingly proceed to publication. ISO/IEC 29500 is a standard for word-processing documents, presentations and spreadsheets that is intended to be implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms. According to the submitters of the document, one of its objectives is to ensure the long-term preservation of documents created over the last two decades using programmes that are becoming incompatible with continuing advances in the field of information technology. ISO/IEC DIS 29500 was originally developed as the Office Open XML Specification by Microsoft Corporation which submitted it to Ecma International, an information technology industry association, for transposing into an ECMA standard. Following a process in which other IT industry players participated, Ecma International subsequently published the document as ECMA standard 376. Ecma International then submitted the standard in December 2006 to ISO/IEC JTC 1, with whom it has category A liaison status, for adoption as an International Standard under the JTC 1 "fast track" procedure. This allows a standard developed within the IT industry to be presented to JTC 1 as a draft international standard (DIS) that can be adopted after a process of review and balloting. This process has now been concluded with the end of the 30-day period following the ballot resolution meeting. The process was open to the IEC and ISO national member bodies from 104 countries, including 41 that are participating members of the joint ISO/IEC JTC 1."

Using the Eclipse BPEL Plug-In for WS-BPEL V2.0 Business Processes
Ilya Platonov, Artem Papkov, Jim Smith; IBM developerWorks

BPEL V2.0 is a powerful language intended to help in development of huge, complex applications consisting of a lot of other components and Web services. The BPEL vendor-neutral specification was developed by OASIS to specify business processes as a set of interactions between Web services. BPEL allows you to describe long-running workflows using graphical editors to present workflows on human-friendly diagrams. The Apache Foundation calls its implementation of the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) V2.0 the Orchestration Director Engine (ODE). ODE executes WS-BPEL processes, which are capable of communicating with Web services, sending and receiving messages, etc. The Eclipse BPEL project is a related open source project that provides an Eclipse plug-in for the visual development of WS-BPEL V2.0 processes. This article examines ODE V1.1 and the Eclipse BPEL project milestone M3, describing how to create your own BPEL process and integrate it into your application. Summary from the ODE web site: "WS-BPEL is an XML-based language defining several constructs to write business processes. It defines a set of basic control structures like conditions or loops as well as elements to invoke web services and receive messages from services. It relies on WSDL to express web services interfaces. Message structures can be manipulated, assigning parts or the whole of them to variables that can in turn be used to send other messages. Apache ODE (Orchestration Director Engine) executes business processes written following the WS-BPEL standard. It talks to web services, sending and receiving messages, handling data manipulation and error recovery as described by your process definition. It supports both long and short living process executions to orchestrate all the services that are part of your application."

Open Web SSO Project - Build 4
Pat Patterson, Blog

Developer blogs from the OpenSSO Project announce the release of OpenSSO Version 1 Build 4. The Open Web SSO project (OpenSSO) provides core identity services to simplify the implementation of transparent single sign-on (SSO) as a security component in a network infrastructure. OpenSSO provides the foundation for integrating diverse web applications that might typically operate against a disparate set of identity repositories and are hosted on a variety of platforms such as web and application servers. This project is based on the code base of Sun Java System Access Manager, a core identity infrastructure product offered by Sun Microsystems. The objectives of the OpenSSO project are to provide open access to an identity infrastructure source code; to enable innovation to build the next generation of open network identity services; and to establish open XML-based file formats and language-independent component application programming interfaces (APIs). New in OpenSSO Build 4, according to Pat Patterson's blog: (1) New OpenSSO configurator; the developers request feedback on the new configuration UI, via the project mailing lists; (2) WS-Trust Security Token Service (STS) is available on Glassfish, Sun Application Server, Sun Web Server, Geronimo, Tomcat and WebSphere; we've done a lot of trickery with classloaders to get this working across a wide range of containers... still working on support in Oracle Application Server, JBoss and WebLogic Server; (3) Simplified STS client sample; (4) Configuration and/or user store replication across multiple OpenSSO instances where the embedded instance of OpenDS is in use; (5) Security/SSL related fixes; (6) General bug fixes in all areas." Note: OpenDS is an open source community project building a free and comprehensive next generation directory service. OpenDS is designed to address large deployments, to provide high performance, to be highly extensible, and to be easy to deploy, manage and monitor. The directory service includes not only the Directory Server, but also other essential directory-related services like directory proxy, virtual directory, namespace distribution and data synchronization. Initial development of OpenDS was done by Sun Microsystems, but is now available under the open source Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).

OASIS Open Reputation Management Systems (ORMS) Technical Committee
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS recently announced the formation of a new technical committee to make it easier to validate the trustworthiness of businesses, projects, and people working and socializing in electronic communities. The OASIS Open Reputation Management Systems (ORMS) Technical Committee will define common data formats for consistently and reliably representing reputation scores. ORMS will be relevant for a variety of applications including validating the trustworthiness of sellers and buyers in online auctions, detecting free riders in peer-to-peer networks, and helping to ensure the authenticity of signature keys in a web of trust. ORMS will also help enable smarter searching of web sites, blogs, events, products, companies, and individuals. Because the majority of existing on-line rating, scoring and reputation mechanisms have been developed by private companies using proprietary schemas, there is currently no common method to query, store, aggregate, or verify claims between systems. The different sources of reputation data—user feedback channels (product ratings, comment forms), online user profiles, etc. -- are each uniquely susceptible to bad actors, manipulation of data for specific purposes, and spammers. ORMS will not attempt to define algorithms for computing reputation scores. Instead, the OASIS Committee will provide the means for understanding the relevancy of a score within a given context.

Facebook Meets .Net
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Facebook is a popular social network site and a destination for application developers, but developers need to learn its peculiarities, according to a VSLive conference presentation in San Francisco. Development on Facebook is more like embedded development rather than normal Web development, said speaker Jeffrey McManus, CEO of Platform Associates, a consulting firm. Facebook is a platform featuring a collection of technologies enabling developers to create applications that incorporate Facebook data. This could include applications, for example, that make Web services calls to Facebook and applications that can run within Facebook. Technologies for developing applications in Facebook include FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and IFrame, an HTML construct that opens a hole in a page enabling display of another page inside of it, according to McManus. Also factored into the equation is Facbook.Net, a .Net library that wraps Web services and handles authentication and other elements. Silverlight, Microsoft's new multimedia presentation technology, also can be supported in Facebook using FBML.

See also: Facebook Markup Language

IONA Becomes Silver Sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation
Staff, IONA Technologies Announcement

IONA announced that it has become a Silver Sponsor of The Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to consensus-based, collaborative software development. Financial sponsorship will help ASF to acquire servers and hardware infrastructure, purchase bandwidth and needed resources, and increase awareness of ASF projects and incubating initiatives. IONA's commitment to Open Source software is an integral part of its 15-year heritage. With a high degree of Open Source community involvement, IONA supports the efforts of its developers who are members and contributors to a number of ASF projects. Aiding the efforts for increased adoption of Open Source SOA, IONA developers play key roles in the Apache ActiveMQ project, the Apache ServiceMix project, the CXF project in the Apache Incubator, and the Apache Camel project, a sub-project of ActiveMQ. IONA's distributed, Open Source SOA infrastructure solutions, FUSE Message Broker, FUSE ESB, FUSE Services Framework and FUSE Mediation Router, are built on code developed in those ASF projects and are distributed under the terms of the Apache License 2.0. IONA provides professional support, consulting and training for enterprise customers looking to deploy this Open Source SOA technology in their mission-critical business applications. IONA also recently announced the launch of Artix Connect for WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). Artix Connect for WCF enables Global 2000 customers to optimize their investments in Microsoft technology and seamlessly extend connectivity with legacy applications from within the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment. By wrapping back-office legacy systems behind standards-based Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces, Artix Connect for WCF allows the .NET developer to connect with Java or CORBA without the need for custom adapters or new code generation. The product enables companies to leverage existing investments in Java, CORBA, and more, without leaving the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment or requiring additional skills. Artix Data Services, a component of IONA's Artix family of advanced SOA infrastructure products, offers the broadest support for financial services standards, message types and validation rules, including SWIFT, SEPA, FpML, TWIST, ISO 20022, CREST and FIX, with the ability to model any data format for complete compliance.

See also: IONA and standards


SEARCH \| ABOUT \| INDEX \| NEWS \| CORE STANDARDS \| TECHNOLOGY REPORTS \| EVENTS \| LIBRARY

Headlines

Sponsors