Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Friday, 18 April 2008

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Edited by Robin Cover

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Headlines

W3C Working Draft: Web Services Internationalization (WS-I18N)
XACML 2.0 RSA 2008 Interop Scenarios
Apache CXF Services Framework Graduates to a Top Level Project
Revised Working Draft: Delivery Context Ontology
W3C Incubator Group Report: Common Web Language
Apache Tuscany Java SDO 1.1 Incubating Release
Will MySQL Keep Lighting up LAMP?
BizTalk RFID Mobile Unveiled
Berkman Center for Internet and Society Turns 10

W3C Working Draft: Web Services Internationalization (WS-I18N)
Addison Phillips, Mary Trumble, Felix Sasaki; W3C Technical Report

W3C announced that members of the Internationalization Core Working Group have published a Working Draft of "Web Services Internationalization (WS-I18N)," updating the earlier document of 2005-09-14. A major change in this version of the document is the adoption of the "Web Services Policy 1.5 - Framework" and "Web Services Policy 1.5 - Attachment" W3C Recommendations as the means to realize the functionality of Web Services Internationalization. No diff-marked version against the previous version of this document is provided, since this change resulted in a thorough restructuring of the document. Web services technology provides application-to-application communication over the Internet. Most programming languages and operating environments use an internationalization model that assumes that the user's preferences (generally embodied as a "locale", that is: a collection of settings associated with a specific language, country, or market) are maintained by the operating environment. This model has been extended to Web-based applications by having Web servers infer their internal locale from the user agent's Accept-Language header (IETF RFC 3282) or from some form of user identity management. However, neither Accept-Language nor user identity is appropriate for the internationalization of Web services. This document ("WS-I18N") describes enhancements to SOAP messaging to provide internationalized and localized operations using locale and international preferences. These mechanisms can be used to accommodate a wide variety of development models for international usage. It proposes an alternative mechanism to provide locale information in a web services interaction. It provides semantics for the identification of international preferences which are as clear and platform neutral as possible, while providing for implementation specific extensions that leverage specific platform capabilities. By itself, WS-I18N does not ensure internationalized operation or that localized operation will occur nor does it provide a complete internationalization solution. WS-I18N is a building block that is used in conjunction with other Web services and application-specific protocols, and which can accommodate a wide variety of locale and international support models. Implementing this specification does not by itself enable international functionality in a Web services interaction, but it does provide a framework for globalization that enabled products can leverage, as well as a way for enabled products to interact with systems that are not enabled.

XACML 2.0 RSA 2008 Interop Scenarios
Rich Levinson (et al, eds), OASIS XACML TC Working Draft

Members of the OASIS Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) Technical Committee have published a Working Draft describing the "XACML 2.0 RSA 2008 Interop Scenarios." The document specifies scenarios that may be used to demonstrate interoperability of multiple PDP, PEP, and PIP modules that were implemented based on the XACML 2.0 Core Specification. It covers Healthcare Fine Grain Authorization Use Cases, Coarse Grain Authorization Decision Request/Response, and Policy Exchange. The XACML 2.0 Specification defines an XML-oriented policy language, which is intended to be used at a Policy Decision Point (PDP) to represent the set of policies that the PDP will use to evaluate decision requests received from a Policy Enforcement Point (PEP). Policies contain expressions that define dynamic access relationship conditions between subjects and resources based on attributes associated with the subject(s) making an access request, attributes associated with the resource(s) to which access is being requested, attributes associated with the action intended to be applied to the resource, and attributes of the operational environment (such as time of day). The PDP determines the set of policies that are applicable to the request, evaluates the applicable policies by collecting attribute information from the request and using it where appropriate in the policy expressions and returns a decision, which may be one of: permit, deny, indeterminate, or not applicable... The Interop scenarios demonstrate how it is possible to use XACML to separate access control logic from the business logic provided by an application. The application does not make access control decisions itself; rather it exports its resource model to the policy writers. The access control policy is then defined with XACML based on the vocabulary that the application provides. The Interop demonstrates how an HL7-based access control vocabulary model can be implemented using XACML. However, a completely different access control model would be possible. For instance if the same medical application is deployed in a different regulatory environment, the access control model can be changed in the XACML policies, without modifications to the application itself. This benefits the application vendor as the same application can be used by a wider audience, and the customers who get access to a wider selection of applications and better flexibility... The associated ZIP file contains the proce document plus the XML files for the policies used at the Interop, plus a collection of test messages that were used prior to the Interop.

Apache CXF Services Framework Graduates to a Top Level Project
Rob Davies, Blog

From Rob Davies and Dan Kulp (via Jim Jagielski) we learn that the Apache Incubator Project Management Committee has approved the graduation of the Apache CXF Project from Incubation to an Apache Top Level Project. Apache CXF is an open source services framework which helps you build and develop services using frontend programming APIs, like JAX-WS. These services can speak a variety of protocols such as SOAP, XML/HTTP, RESTful HTTP, or CORBA and work over a variety of transports such as HTTP, JMS or JBI. CXF represents a merging of the Objectweb Celtix project and the Codehaus XFire project. The goal is to combine the best concepts from the two projects and create an enterprise quality framework work for creating services. CXF supports a variety of web service standards including SOAP, the Basic Profile, WSDL, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-Security. CXF supports a variety of "frontend" programming models: it implements the JAX-WS APIs, and version 2.0 will be TCK compliant. It also includes a "simple frontend" which allows creation of clients and endpoints without annotations. CXF supports both contract first development with WSDL and code first development starting from Java. CXF is designed to be intuitive and easy to use. There are simple APIs to quickly build code-first services, Maven plug-ins to make tooling integration easy, JAX-WS API support, Spring 2.0 XML support to make configuration a snap, and much more. As for Binary and Legacy Protocol Support: CXF has been designed to provide a pluggable architecture that supports not only XML but also non-XML type bindings, such as JSON and CORBA, in combination with any type of transport. Rob Davies wrote: "Congratulations to Dan Kulp and the rest of the community for graduating CXF out of the incubator at Apache! This is a big deal, it's taken 20 months to finally prove that there is a vibrant and diverse community behind Apache CXF. There's often a misconception that graduating from the incubator at Apache is related to the code's maturity—but CXF has always been a very stable and mature product... the Apache Software Foundation isn't about just the business friendly license, as Apache projects have business friendly communities too. To get out of the incubator the project needs to have a diverse number of committers and develop code in a collaborative and meritocratic way. This ensures that a project is a vibrant entity in its own right, outside the influence of one company or an individual developer."

See also: the Apache CXF Project

Revised Working Draft: Delivery Context Ontology
Rhys Lewis and Jose Manuel Cantera Fonseca (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C's Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group has published an updated Working Draft for "Delivery Context Ontology." The W3C UWA Working Group seeks to simplify the creation of distributed Web applications involving a wide diversity of devices, including desktop computers, office equipment, home media appliances, mobile devices (phones), physical sensors and effectors (including RFID and barcodes). The Delivery Context Ontology provides a formal model of the characteristics of the environment in which devices interact with the Web or other services. The delivery context includes the characteristics of the device, the software used to access the service and the network providing the connection among others. The delivery context is an important source of information that can be used to adapt materials to make them useable on a wide range of different devices with different capabilities. The ontology is formally specified in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This document describes the ontology and gives details of each property that it contains. The core, normative sections and examples of this document are generated automatically from the ontology itself. Properties are associated with classes within the ontology. Each top level class is documented in its own chapter. Subclasses are documented within the chapter for their superclass. Cross references within this document link properties, classes and examples of their use. In the Property Tables, each class in the ontology is associated with a set of properties. These properties are defined in tables in the appropriate section of the specification. Examples are given for specific classes in the specification. The associated tables contain one or more example classes, complete with values for each of their properties. The ontology contains a large number of disjoint classes. OWL-DL requires explicit definition of each disjoint relationship between classes. The number of such definitions becomes unmanageably large in ontololgies with a large number of classes. Fortunately, there is an alternative mechanism for ensuring that classes are considered disjoint, without requiring the use of explicit statements. The mechanism relies on each class including a property that has a unique value. In this ontology, the property used is called deliveryContextEntityName. Each class derived from DeliveryContextEntity includes this property. Each class has a unique value for this property.

W3C Incubator Group Report: Common Web Language
Hiroshi Uchida, Toshio Yokoi (et al., eds), Incubator Group Final Report

Members of the W3C Common Web Language Incubator Group have published a Final Report. Currently almost all web pages are written in English. It is convenient for English speaking people but it is not for non-English speaking people, and those people are the majority in the world. Those people cannot get information easily, because it is not written in their mother tongue. Recently machine translation facilities are equipped in the web, but it is not the solutions. Machine translation has a problem of quality and coverage of languages. HTML tags give information on structure of web documents, but they do not give semantic information on each words nor sentences in documents. It means HTM tags information is insufficient to intellectually utilize contents of web pages. The RDF and OWL have a framework to give semantic information but they do not have standard vocabulary to describe web contents. The goal of the Common Web Language is to allow the exchange of information through the Web and also for enabling computers to process information semantically. CWL allows people to describe contents and meta-data of Web pages written in natural language; the language seeks to lower language barriers and to facilitate the automatic extraction of information from Web pages. The CWL is a graph language of semantic hyper directed graph, a node represents a concept, an arc represents a relation between nodes and a node can be annotated by attributes. This CWL can be expressed in three languages UNL, CDL and RDF/OWL. The same information in CWL can be described in each language but in different manner. The CWL.unl is a language based on UNL. The CWL.cdl is a language based on the CDL. The CWL.rdf is a language based on RDF/OWL. Three different types of representations of CWL allow different way of treatment of the same information described. The CWL.unl is for multilingualism, The CWL.cdl has compatibility with semantic computing systems for semantic computing, The CWL.rdf is for working with various data navigation and aggregation systems (like SPARQL). Compatibility among expressions in UNL (CWL.unl), CDL (CWL.cdl), and RDF is guaranteed.

Apache Tuscany Java SDO 1.1 Incubating Release
Staff, Apache Tuscany Project Announcement

Developers in the Apache Tuscany Project have announced the release of Apache Tuscany Java SDO 1.1. The Tuscany community is working to create a robust and easy to use infrastructure that simplifies the development of service-based application networks and addresses real business problems posed in SOA. Tuscany is based on specifications defined by the Open CSA Collaboration. Service Data Object (SDO) provides a uniform interface for handling different forms of data, including XML documents, that can exist in a network of services and provides the mechanism for tracking changes. Apache Tuscany's SDO Java Release 1.1-incubating is the second such release with full coverage of the SDO 2.1 specification—the first being 1.0-incubating. This release includes some new features and improvements along with a number of bug fixes. Service Data Objects (SDO) are designed to simplify and unify the way in which applications handle data. Using SDO, application programmers can uniformly access and manipulate data from heterogeneous data sources, including relational databases, XML data sources, Web services, and enterprise information systems. Tuscany SDO provides an implementation of the SDO 2.1 specification, this 1.1 release includes several new features and improvements over the 1.0 release such as: (1) the ability to generate SDO test classes using the maven-sdo-plugin; (2) support for custom data binding of DataObjects in a Swing UI; (3) Using the HelperContext for scope in the Tuscany API; (4) Improved diagnostics. Tuscany is an effort undergoing incubation at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), sponsored by the Apache Web services PMC.

See also: the Apache Tuscany Project

Will MySQL Keep Lighting up LAMP?
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, InfoWorld

Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now Sun Microsystems' senior vice president for databases, came to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Super Computing Center to explain that MySQL was not about to abandon Linux... The pro-Linux crowd of 200-plus were worried that now, with Sun in charge of MySQL, Sun's focus would be on creating a SAMP (Solaris, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) software ecosystem instead of supporting the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) stack, which has enabled Linux to gain $21 billion worth of traction in the server market. Their concerns are that if Sun makes improvements in MySQL under the CDDL, it will restrict their the users' ability to use new versions of MySQL with their applications. For businesses, of course, the concern is whether they'll continue to get the promised improvements in LAMP application from MySQL improvements in a timely fashion... [but] Sun announced the next version of MySQL: MySQL 5.1. This edition, which is now available as a release candidate, is still under the Linux-friendly GPLv2. Perhaps more important, from the viewpoint of Linux users, the release candidate is available on all of MySQL's supported Linux hardware platforms. So, for example, businesses that use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Linux on IBM's Power or S/390 architectures, all will be working with the most up-to-date version of MySQL. According to a press statement by Mickos, MySQL 5.1 will run "up to 15 percent faster than previous versions in our own internal tests, making it a compelling solution for demanding Web-based enterprise applications." It promises to be attractive not just to Linux developers but to any business that depends on LAMP stacks. For now, at least, there seems to be no concrete reason for LAMP programmers or enterprise users to worry about the future of LAMP applications. While Sun may have had problems with Linux, its continued partnership with Red Hat, its new server partnership with Ubuntu and Mickos' statements, it's clear that Sun/MySQL's recent actions all point to a long and prosperous life for LAMP.

BizTalk RFID Mobile Unveiled
Kurt Mackie, Application Development Trends

Microsoft has described its new platform to help developers more easily create mobile applications that make use of radiofrequency identification (RFID) technology. The company unveiled BizTalk RFID Mobile, a solution designed to work with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and other Microsoft products. According to the announcement, RFID Mobile is "a lightweight platform for a variety of mobile devices, which simplifies the development of mobile applications that expose relevant, real-time business information. BizTalk RFID Mobile enables delivery of relevant information from mobile devices to core business processes for a variety of scenarios, whether for a dock worker verifying a shipment or a pharmacist verifying that the right medicine has been stocked. As part of the Microsoft BizTalk product line, Microsoft BizTalk RFID Mobile underscores the company's long-term commitment to deliver extensive service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) capabilities as part of the overall Microsoft application platform. The platform is a set of compatible, mission-critical technologies and development tools that enable customers to develop applications that work with existing systems. Microsoft BizTalk RFID Mobile when used with BizTalk Server 2006 R2 enables real-time decisions by extending business process to Windows CE and Windows Mobile 5.0 applications. BizTalk Server 2006 R2, Microsoft's core SOA and BPM technology, which was generally available in September 2007, included advancements for fixed RFID readers including device management, data filtering and business rules, electronic data interchange (EDI), and interoperability with line-of-business adapters for manufacturing, finance and healthcare." General availability of BizTalk RFID Mobile is expected in "late 2008"; in the mean time, the company started a program for its customers and partners to test out the solutions. They can sign up for Microsoft's "BizTalk RFID Mobile Technology Adoption Program" through the Microsoft Connect Web site. In addition to rolling out BizTalk RFID Mobile, which was announced at the RFID Journal Live 2008 event, Microsoft unfurled a new BizTalk RFID Standards Pack. The pack helps with the integration of various standards in RFID solutions, such as Electronic Product Code, Low Level Reader Protocol and Tag Data Translator.

See also: the Microsoft announcement

Berkman Center for Internet and Society Turns 10
Jim Rapoza, eWEEK Blog

Berkman CenterThe Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The Berkman Center's mission is "to explore and understand cyberspace; to study its development, dynamics, norms, and standards; and to assess the need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions." If you don't know about the Berkman Center itself, you almost certainly know about some of the major technology initiatives that have sprung from the center, such as Creative Commons and Chilling Effects. And there's also a good chance that you know of some of their noted alumni and current staff, including Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain. John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center, a law professor at the Harvard Law School is himself a noted cyber-law expert; Palfrey is currently finishing up a book on digital natives or what is also called the millennial generation. Creative Commons has changed the way many people look at intellectual property, making it possible for content creators to protect their work while also making it very open to the community at large. Chilling Effects has helped to expose the aggressive use of cease-and-desist orders to try to bully Web sites and others into compliance by both showing and archiving these orders and providing information on good legal recourse for those facing these orders. And stopbadware.org has provided a valuable and balanced resource for those looking to stop the spread of adware and malicious spyware. Palfrey said that though the Berkman Center is often philosophically aligned with groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, they themselves are not an advocacy group. He said the center is mainly focused on openness, law and the Internet and finding the truth in the major issues facing the Internet today. Of course, when a group is focused on openness and the truth, it makes sense that they won't be seen as on the same side as those looking to control the Internet and hide the truth of their activities.

See also: the Berkman Center


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