Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Tuesday, 29 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

HP Enhancing SOA Products in Mainstream Effort
Schema-aware Processing with XSLT 2.0
W3C Last Call Working Draft for XMLHttpRequest Object Specification
OASIS Forms Telecommunications Services Member Section (OASIS Telecom)
Jenabean: Easily Bind JavaBeans to RDF
IANA Update: Project to Convert Registries to XML
Mark Logic: An XQuery Company to Watch

HP Enhancing SOA Products in Mainstream Effort
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Seeking to enhance mainstream SOA deployments, HP is increasing SOA quality management capabilities in several products. The rollout serves as an extension of the HP Business Technology Optimization for SOA portfolio. Featured are upgraded versions of SOA testing products HP Service Test and HP Service Test Management as well as new management capabilities in HP Business Availability for SOA, HP Diagnostics for SOA, and HP SOA Policy Enforcer, formerly called HP SOA Manager. Service Test and Service Test Management work with HP Quality Center, which is HP's management portfolio. Service Test Management 9.9.3 enables quality assurance teams to execute quality management activities from a service-oriented perspective... Teams can report on the pre-production quality of SOA services. The product integrates with HP SOA Systinet to use quality management metrics to alert that services can be consumed. Service Test 9.12 provides functional testing of SOA services to reduce the risk of application failures, the company said. New capabilities include expanded support for such standards as SOAP over Java Message Service, WS-Addressing, and SAML. Business Availability Center for SOA manages shared services within operational infrastructure and processes. Proactive problem resolution is provided. Diagnostics for SOA allows SOA teams to drill down into the behavior of shared services to resolve problems before customers are impacted. Problem resolution has been added for infrastructure, such as ESBs and SOAP stacks, and users are given assistance in improving performance and meeting service-level agreements...

See also: the HP announcement

Schema-aware Processing with XSLT 2.0
Mukul Gandhi, IBM developerWorks

With the publication of the W3C specification for the XSLT 2.0 language, one of the most important innovations was introduced into the XSLT language: the ability for the XSLT processor to utilize XML schemas for input and output documents, as well as for temporary trees and constructs that expect types to be specified, such as function and template parameters, and variables. Schema awareness is an optional feature for the XSLT processor to implement. An XSLT processor that doesn't implement schema-aware facilities is known as a basic XSLT processor, whereas one that does implement such facilities is known as a schema-aware XSLT processor. This article assumes that you have knowledge of XML and the W3C XML Schema language, and preferably some knowledge of XSLT. To exploit the schema-aware facilities in the XSLT stylesheets effectively, you need to understand the syntax and semantics of XML Schema in detail. Making XSLT stylesheets schema-aware produces the following benefits: (1) You can perform type-aware operations on the nodes by validating the input trees and attaching the type annotations to the XML nodes. This also ensures that invalid input is not processed by the stylesheet. (2) You can validate output trees with a particular schema, thereby making sure that you don't produce invalid output from the XSLT transformation. (3) You can assign types to XSLT variables, function/template parameters, and return values. This provides enhanced static typing, which is beneficial during the compilation phase of the stylesheet. (4) Enhanced compile-time type checking reduces the likelihood of errors popping up in later phases. The sooner that you detect the errors, the less amount of time you require to fix them. (5) Having user-defined schema types available in the stylesheet makes the type system of XSLT infinitely extensible. As a result, the stylesheet comes closer to solving the business problem.

W3C Last Call Working Draft for XMLHttpRequest Object Specification
Anne van Kesteren (ed), W3C Technical Report

W3C announced that members of the Web API Working Group have published a Last Call Working Draft for "The XMLHttpRequest Object" specification. The XMLHttpRequest Object specification defines an API that provides scripted client functionality for transferring data between a client and a server. The core component of AJAX, the XMLHttpRequest object is an interface that allows scripts to perform HTTP client functions, such as submitting form data or loading data from a remote Web site. The name of the object is XMLHttpRequest for compatibility with the Web, though each component of this name is potentially misleading. First, the object supports any text based format, including XML. Second, it can be used to make requests over both HTTP and HTTPS (some implementations support protocols in addition to HTTP and HTTPS, but that functionality is not covered by this specification). Finally, it supports "requests" in a broad sense of the term as it pertains to HTTP; namely all activity involved with HTTP requests or responses for the defined HTTP methods. The W3C Web API Working Group was chartered to develop standard APIs for client-side Web Application development. It is part of the W3C Rich Web Clients Activity, which also contains the work within W3C on Web Applications and Compound Document Formats. With the ubiquity of Web browsers and Web document formats across a range of platforms and devices, many developers are using the Web as an application environment. Examples of applications built on rich Web clients include reservation systems, online shopping or auction sites, games, multimedia applications, calendars, maps, chat applications, weather displays, clocks, interactive design applications, stock tickers, currency converters and data entry/display systems.

See also: the W3C news item

OASIS Forms Telecommunications Services Member Section (OASIS Telecom)
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS announced the formation of a new Telecommunications Services Member Section (OASIS Telecom) "to pave the way for a new business model that will make telecommunications services more intelligent, deployable, and easy to consume." Through the formation and oversight of new technical committees, OASIS Telecom will work to optimize the Web services stack for telecommunications industry and develop common data models to enable the seamless exchange of information between networks and between the network and application domains. OASIS Telecom members will also align work already in place at OASIS and in the telecommunications community on identity and naming. In addition to co-chairs Abbie Barbir and Stephane H. Maes, the OASIS Telecom Steering Committee includes Michael Brenner of Alactel-Lucent, Zulah Eckert of BEA Systems, Takashi Egawa of NEC, Orit Levine of Microsoft, and Tony Nadalin of IBM. Statements of support for OASIS Telecom have been provided by Alcatel-Lucent, BEA, IBM, Microsoft, NEC, Nortel, Oracle, Primeton, and Progress Software. Abbie Barbir: "We recognize there are gaps that prevent today's SOA standards from delivering the complete integration and interoperability that telecommunications providers need; the most effective way to bridge these gaps is a cooperative effort that brings the expertise of telecommunications, IT, and standards bodies together within the organization that is responsible for defining core SOA standards." Stephane H. Maes: "By exposing the underlying value of the network to IT applications—while at the same time allowing the network to access IT services—OASIS Telecom can enable communications companies to redefine their role from access providers to service providers. The work of OASIS Telecom will help communications companies achieve a homogeneous environment that spans time-sensitive and traditional IT services."

Jenabean: Easily Bind JavaBeans to RDF
Taylor Cowan, IBM developerWorks

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) proposed standard for linking and expressing data on the Web. Jenabean uses the Jena Semantic Web framework's flexible RDF/OWL API to persist JavaBeans, making the task of writing these applications easier and more familiar to Java developers. Java developers are fortunate because in Jena they have one of the better RDF frameworks available. Jena provides an API for writing and reading RDF, which can be stored and persisted in various ways. Jena is engineered to work well with RDF data models, just as JDBC is suited for working with relational models. Database applications consist largely of code written to save Java objects, as well as code written to marshal objects from the database. Semantic Web applications written in Java code face a similar problem: they must either convert Java objects to RDF or convert RDF to objects. As a consequence, developers must write a considerable amount of code to bridge the gap between their own model (usually JavaBeans) and Jena's RDF-centric API. This article shows you how the Jenabean Java-to-RDF binding framework helps simplify this process and reduce the amount of code you need to write. It examines some example Jena client code and compares it to Jenabean's JavaBean-based programming model. From the Google Code project ['jenabean - A library for persisting java beans to RDF'] web site: "jenabean uses Jena's flexible RDF/OWL api to persist java beans. It takes an unconventional approach to binding that is driven by the java object model rather than an OWL or RDF schema. jenabean is annotation based and does not place any interface or extension requirements on your java object model. By default jenabean uses typical java bean conventions to derive RDF property URI's, for example, the java bean property 'name' would become RDF property 'hasName'. jenabean allows for explicit binding between an object property and a particular RDF property."

IANA Update: Project to Convert Registries to XML
Staff, IANA Announcement

A communication to IETF from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) announces engagement in a project to convert the IETF related registries to XML in order to "provide the community with multiple ways of viewing registry information. When conversion to XML is done, XML will become the source format for the registries and the current formats of HTML and plain text will be generated from the XML source. Stylesheets and schemas will also be made available together with XML. Users will be able to access the registries in new and useful ways, while still having the ability to see the registries in the original style. IANA is not changing the data in the registries [but rather] is cleaning up the formatting including regularizing spacing and providing consistent display of titles, references and registration procedures. For those registries that need extensive format changes, IANA will be working with the appropriate working groups and area directors to make sure that the format changes do not affect the content of the registry. Those registries that are required to be in specific formats, for example the MIBs and language subtags registries, will still be produced in the existing formats. IANA has consulted with the IETF XML directorate to make sure that the XML schemas are properly formulated. Certain decisions on schemas reflect the needs of IANA in maintaining the registries moving forward... We look forward to providing the XML versions of the registries to better serve the community's needs. IANA will announce in advance when the registry conversion will be completed. After the conversion is complete, we intend to introduce new services such as the ability to subscribe to be notified when specific registries are updated."

See also: the IANA web site

Mark Logic: An XQuery Company to Watch
Staff, OpEd

The blogosphere warmed up a bit when veteran (SGML/XML) markup language experts learned that Norm Walsh is joining Mark Logic. The Mark Logic flagship product, MarkLogic Server, includes a unique set of capabilities to store, aggregate, enrich, search, navigate and dynamically deliver content. On top of this platform, partners and customers build information access and delivery solutions used by publishers, government agencies and other large enterprises to accelerate the creation of content applications. MarkLogic Server was architected top-to-bottom for XML content and provides the most extensive implementation of XQuery, the W3C standard query language for accessing XML documents, on the market today. Open interfaces allow enhancement and enrichment of content without the need to modify the original source files, and real-time update capabilities eliminate the need to re-load as metadata changes... XML repository: "For many organizations, the first step on the path to content agility is to create a master XML repository of their content on top of which they can build new information products that slice, dice and repurpose content in new and exciting ways. By using MarkLogic Server as your enterprise's primary XML repository you can create a single copy-of-record where all your content can be stored and easily accessed using the powerful XQuery language." Norm Walsh, editor of the OASIS DocBook specification (also: member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG), and co-winner of the 2005 IDEAlliance XML Cup Award with Michael Kay) glosses Mark Logic as "Makers of an exceptional XQuery engine and XML content platform. And my new employers... Starting in May, I'll be working for Mark Logic as a 'Principal Technologist' in their publishing group. Mark Logic is doing exactly what interests me: XML markup of mixed content. At the end of the day, I think that's where all the really interesting data is to be found: I'm a document guy. Typed object graphs and relational tables are a fine way to store data, but data doesn't have any meaning until it's put into context, and we put information into context by documenting it: by writing mixed content and surrounding it with markup. My day job will consist of some mixture of web standards, product development, evangelism, customer engagements, consulting, and probably other stuff too. Ask me again in a few months. So far, everyone I've met at Mark Logic has been great and the more I dig into the server product, the more impressed I become."


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