Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Wednesday, 30 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

Service Component Architecture: Making SOA Easier
DMTF Releases WS-Management Specification as a Final Standard
W3C Call for Implementations: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
Use XQuery from a Java Environment
TIBCO Proactive Management Approach Enables SOA as a Managed Service
OASIS Members Propose Creation of DITA Adoption Subcommittee

Service Component Architecture: Making SOA Easier
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Service Component Architecture (SCA), an SOA specification for transforming IT assets into reusable services, was hailed Tuesday [2008-04-29] as a way to build services with lower barriers to adoption and link SOA to Web 2.0. Speaking at the OASIS Open Standards 2008 symposium in Santa Clara, Calif., IBM's Mike Edwards, co chair of the OASIS SCA Assembly Technical Committee, touted the technology. He also promoted its companion specification, Service Data Objects (SDO), which enables uniform access and manipulation of data from multiple sources, including databases and enterprise information systems. SDO and SCA are backed by companies such as IBM and SAP... SCA provides an executable model for assembling services and supports multiple languages such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), Java and PHP scripts. Web 2.0 could leverage SCA, since Web 2.0 environments are typically service environments, Edwards said. An interactive application running on a browser has pieces running on the front end that requires knowledge of connections pertaining to what is running on the front-end system and the server. SCA "is a great way to deal with that," said Edwards. SCA offers a single programming model for aspects of the service lifecycle, including construction, assembly, and deployment. Developers can focus on writing business logic. SCA is not tied to a specific programming language, protocol, technology, or runtime. It is not a workflow model such as BPEL, and it is not Web services—although many SCA applications will use Web services... SDO gives developers a single programming model for using data sources. Edwards cited the example of a bank using SDO and SCA for an SOA rollout. Services were built with SCA while IFX (Internal Financial Exchange) data was packaged with SDO... There are multiple implementations of SCO and SDO; official 1.0 versions of SDO and SCA from OASIS are expected by the end of 2008.

DMTF Releases WS-Management Specification as a Final Standard
Staff, Distributed Management Task Force Announcement

DMTF announced that its Web Services for Management (WS-Management) standard has been ratified Final. Since its debut in April 2006, WS-Management has been successfully implemented in a wide range of products from DMTF member companies—moving it from a Preliminary to Final Standard. IT managers benefit from WS-Management because deployments that support the standard will enable them to remotely access devices on their networks—everything from desktop and mobile systems and servers today, to power management and virtualized environments in the future. WS-Management helps reduce the cost and complexity of IT management by leveraging Internet protocols and standards to manage diverse deployments of the Common Information Model (CIM) instrumented devices. It also helps enable a secure, simple and low-cost platform for managing mixed IT environments. The WS-Management standard, the latest component of DMTF's Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) initiative, has provided an important building block ingredient for DMTF management initiatives. The WS-Management standard is also referenced as the protocol of choice for both the Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware (DASH) and Systems Management Architecture for System Hardware (SMASH) initiatives. The WS-Management specification promotes interoperability between management applications and managed resources by identifying a core set of Web service specifications and usage requirements to expose a common set of operations that are central to all systems management. The specification also enables the same protocol interface to be used in various scenarios for different operating systems and system states and provides a security profile to ensure encrypted and authenticated exchange of data. WS-Management is an important specification in support of the DMTF effort to expose the CIM resources via state-of-the-art Web services protocols. Coupled with Web Services CIM and the WS-Management CIM Binding, the WS-Management specification allows systems and services to be managed by a wide assortment of management tools and systems, giving customers a greater choice on the tools they use for their management infrastructure.

See also: the DMTF web site

W3C Call for Implementations: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
Staff, W3C Announcement

W3C announced that the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0" is ready for developers and designers to test in Web content and Web applications. Publication of WCAG 2.0 as a Candidate Recommendation, a major step in the W3C standards process, signals broad consensus in the WCAG Working Group and among public reviewers on the technical content of the document. WCAG addresses accessibility of Web content for people with disabilities and many elderly users, and is one of three Web accessibility guidelines produced by W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). WCAG 2.0 provides a stable foundation for accessibility of Web content and Web applications, and supporting documents enable it to be used flexibly across the broad range of Web technologies and environments in today's Web. WCAG 2.0 is designed to be easier to use than WCAG 1.0, and is more precisely testable, using a combination of automated testing and human evaluation. The Working Group seeks feedback from implemention experience of WCAG 2.0 in diverse types of Web sites and Web applications by 30-June-2008. A comprehensive suite of supporting documents is available to help implementors, and includes How to Meet WCAG 2.0, which allows developers and designers to build a customized view of WCAG 2.0 requirements; Understanding WCAG 2.0; Techniques for WCAG 2.0; an Overview of WCAG 2.0 Documents; a WCAG 2.0 FAQ; and Comparison between WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 to support transitions to WCAG 2.0. Gregg Vanderheiden, Co-Chair of the WCAG Working Group, and Director of the Trace R&D Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: "WCAG 2.0 has been developed with extensive community input. We've worked very hard, including publishing twelve Working Drafts and addressing more than 3000 comments, in order to ensure that WCAG 2.0 meets the need for an updated international standard with which national and local Web accessibility guidelines can harmonize."

See also: the WCAG 2 FAQ document

Use XQuery from a Java Environment
Brett D. McLaughlin, IBM developerWorks

While the world of programming—and particularly Java programming -- seems to increase, the number of standardized choices is growing as well. In other words, more and more APIs blessed or approved by Sun are available. The result of this standardization is that an increasing number of developers are branching out beyond their core competencies, and learning new technologies. High on the list of interesting and worthwhile tools and APIs to master are those that deal with data. No matter how cool or clever an application, it's ultimately only as useful as its ability to work with data. And, while the number of APIs constantly expands, the popular and commonly used number of data formats steadily decreases. While some data managers still use object-oriented database management systems, or XML-driven databases, relational databases (RDBMSs) have weathered that storm, and still seem the choice of most data managers. That leaves the Java developer with JDBC (for database connectivity) or perhaps JDO (Java Data Objects) to interact with SQL databases. Data not in databases has also almost all standardized on XML as a data format. XML is robust, albeit verbose, and there are perhaps more APIs for working with XML than any other non-Java medium in the language. Whether it's parsing, data binding, or transforming, if your application can't deal with XML, then it's considered limited and perhaps even a bit behind the times. These two seemingly unrelated facts—the propensity for data to live in SQL databases and the popularity of XML for all data outside of a database—has created some unique problems, though. SQL databases are easy to query; XML documents are not. Consumers expect to be able to search through data easily, and while this works nicely with data in databases, it's not so trivial with data in XML documents. Obviously, taking XML-formatted data and dumping it into a database just to make searching easier is the wrong approach. And that's where XQuery—and as a corollary, the XQuery API for Java (XQJ) comes in... The power of XQuery is now available to Java programmers without resorting to system calls or unwieldy APIs, all in a Sun-standardized package.

TIBCO Proactive Management Approach Enables SOA as a Managed Service
Dana Gardner, ZDNet Blog

A series of announcements from TIBCO Software's user conference, TUCON in San Francisco, underscores the need for SOA support and performance management to gain maturity, and for those scaling up SOA activities to now look for the means to provide mission-critical performance in all circumstances. TIBCO rolled out ActiveMatrix Service Performance Manager, which helps companies predict and fix IT problems. The performance management support, which maps dependencies and supports SLA-based delivery, is designed to play well with SOA governance, an important part of taking SOA governance to the next level. TIBCO is also delivering an 'ultra-low latency' message delivery support with its first messaging appliance. Proper performance demands raw horsepower, in addition to the finesse of dependencies mapping and vulnerability predictions. Two intriguing partnership announcements: TIBCO has partnered with Microsoft on SOA adoption paths, and TIBCO has selected Microsoft Silverlight for building and delivering rich Internet applications, which builds on TIBCO'S AJAX development. Secondly, TIBCO is partnering with BMC Software, in that BMC will use TIBCO infrastructure as the SOA foundation for its Business Service Management Platform. The need to detect behaviors and patterns in ongoing SOA-based processes and transactions will provide the confidence and transparency large organizations require to build out SOA systems and methods across more business critical activities. Complex event processing offers a key ingredient for this SOA forensics value to occur.

See also: the InfoWorld article

OASIS Members Propose Creation of DITA Adoption Subcommittee
Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC Mebers, Proposal

Members of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee have published a draft Statement of Purpose for an OASIS DITA Adoption Subcommittee. The OASIS DITA Adoption Subcommittee members will collaborate to provide expertise and resources to educate the marketplace on the value of the DITA OASIS Standard. By raising awareness of the benefits offered by DITA, the Subcommittee increases the demand for and availability of DITA conforming products and services, resulting in a greater choice of tools and platforms and expanding the DITA community of users, suppliers, and consultants. By advancing the adoption of DITA through OASIS, the Subcommittee members will: (1) Collaborate within the security of the OASIS open process; (2) Maximize message credibility by working on behalf of a vendor-neutral standards consortium; (3) Build on existing market awareness of OASIS as the source of DITA; (4) Leverage the combined resources of all participants; (5) Reinforce DITA as the result of an open, transparent process guided by multiple vendors, communities, and individuals; (6) Openly share content and coordinate program execution with other entities that share a common or similar statement of purpose on a worldwide scope. OASIS DITA Adoption Subcommittee activities would include a range of activities, for example: providing oversight for the DITA XML.org Focus Area, staging interoperability and/or proof-of-concept demonstrations at industry conferences, monitoring accuracy of DITA references in commonly used resources such as Wikipedia, producing OASIS-branded primers, white papers, position papers, slide presentations, datasheets, and other collateral...

See also: DITA references


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

Headlines

Sponsors