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Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by:
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Headlines
W3C First Public Working Draft: Representing Content in RDF
Johannes Koch and Carlos A. Velasco (eds), W3C Technical Report
Members of the W3C Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG) have published the First Working Draft for "Representing Content in RDF." This document is the specification for a vocabulary to represent Content in RDF. There is a wide variety of scenarios where a representation of any type of content, either on the Web or in any local storage media, is necessary. The specification provides an RDF application that allows to present semantically such content. The vocabulary is built in a flexible manner, thus there are no limitations known at the time of writing this specification. It also provides opportunities for extensions to match particular needs of its users. This document assumes the following background knowledge: (a) Basic knowledge of XML and its associated technologies. (b) Basic knowledge about the Semantic Web and RDF. It must be also borne in mind that RDF is primarily targeted to be machine processable, and therefore, some of its expressions are not very intuitive for developers used to work with XML only. The examples will be serialized using the abbreviated RDF/XML notation. The RDF terms defined by this document can be used to extend the Evaluation And Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema, but can also be used separately to record different representations of content for any purpose. For example it can be used together with the HTTP Vocabulary in RDF to describe Web content that has been retrieved from a server using specific HTTP headers. The Working Group believes that this document is fairly stable despite being a first public working draft. The group encourages feedback about the approach, as well as about the completeness and maturity of this document by developers and researchers who have interest in representing content in RDF format... Typical applications would be: (1) Applications dealing with retrieval, editing and storage of content. For example, an archiving application could store in a database annotated media content that includes a serialization of the media files with this vocabulary. (2) Applications dealing with the exchange of text documents and other types of media, like Web Services. For example, an AJAX application could exchange document fragments and images with a Web server to react to different user actions. (3) Applications dealing with the testing and/or repair of content. For example, an accessibility testing tool could store together with the results of a compliance test, the tested Web resources to ensure that the correct version of the tested subject is available to the developers.
See also: the updated specification 'HTTP Vocabulary in RDF'
Working with jQuery: Bringing Desktop Applications to the Browser
Michael Abernethy, IBM developerWorks
jQuery has distanced itself from other JavaScript library options to become the library of choice for Web developers and is fast becoming the first choice for programmers looking to ease their client-side development and create Rich Internet Applications (RIA) quickly and efficiently. As the use of RIA becomes ever-more prevalent in the world, the use of JavaScript libraries to assist in their development will continue to increase as well. RIAs are defined (loosely) as applications run through the browser that use a combination of CSS/JavaScript/Ajax to create the appearance of working on a desktop application. The latest features being added to recent releases of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and the recent release of Google's new Chrome browser, are focused on beefing up the speed of each browser's internal JavaScript engine for the sole purpose of making it more conducive to the type of RIAs that the browser makers picture us using in the near future. These companies envision Web pages that contain tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript code, making the importance of a mature and bug-free library from which to start all the more crucial... This first (Part 1) article in this jQuery series begins by exploring the syntax of jQuery, how it is set up, and how its functions are called. Later sections in this article explore the core functions in the library and how it uses its powerful selectors and filters to make DOM traversal easy and straightforward. Later articles will address CSS manipulation, form control, text changes, Ajax simplicity, and animations (everyone's favorite eye candy). One of the most interesting features of jQuery is its plug-in architecture, allowing many developers to add on to the functionality of jQuery. The final article will introduce you to many of the powerful plug-ins available to complete your RIA development process. This series of articles is intended for people who have prior knowledge of JavaScript syntax, CSS syntax, and DOM syntax.
See also: the jQuery web site
ActiveVOS 6.0 Gains BPMN for Adjusting Workflows
David Worthington, SD Times
The developer of a visual service orchestration environment for Java has updated its product to export business process models to Business Process Execution Language for the fine-tuning of workflows involving people. It has also added complex event processing to increase developer responsiveness. Active Endpoints' ActiveVOS 6.0 became generally available yesterday. ActiveVOS is a visual service orchestration development environment that uses BPEL4PEOPLE and WS-Human Task to recognize and work with human-focused tasks. It works in conjunction with debugging, deployment and testing facilities to help project teams design and maintain composite applications. Version 6.0 adds Business Process Modeling Notation; its designer has a view for BPMN similar to its existing BPEL canvass, according to product manager Mike Moniz. Now developers may add metadata to the model and simulate it with real or historical data before exporting it to BPEL or, alternatively, Extensible Business Document Language. BPEL permits the logical model to be transformed into a running application, according to the company. Likewise, BPEL processes can be converted into BPMN to document processes. ActiveVOS can import BPMN models from other modeling tools, including Microsoft Visio. New Complex Event Processing (CEP) capabilities can help identify when processes created from models run awry with real-world operations. ActiveVOS' CEP engine uses an event processing language to identify key performance indicators and patterns within a process, and developers can adjust processes in response. In response to customer feedback, Active Endpoints has updated its console's look and feel, and it has also added new content, such as business intelligence- and reporting tools-based dashboards for business analysts and end users, to monitor business process activity. It has also included a wizard for developers to reuse plain old Java objects as native Web services in order to orchestrate Web services that already exist.
See also: the ActiveVOS system features
Working Draft: CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3
Bert Bos and Elika J. Etemad (eds), W3C Technical Report
Members of the W3C Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group have published a Working Draft for "CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3," updating a previous working draft of 2005-02-16. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents such as HTML and XML. This draft contains the features of CSS level 3 relating to borders and backgrounds. It includes and extends the functionality of CSS level 2. The main extensions compared to level 2 are borders consisting of images, boxes with multiple backgrounds, boxes with rounded corners and boxes with shadows. This module replaces two earlier drafts: CSS3 Backgrounds and CSS3 Border. When elements are rendered according to the CSS box model, each element is either not displayed at all, or formatted as one or more rectangular boxes. Each box has a rectangular content area, a band of padding around the content, a border around the padding, and a margin outside the border. The margin may actually be negative, but margins have no influence on the background and border. The child elements of an element usually create boxes of their own, that are placed inside the content area of their parent, although they may also be placed outside it. The reason an element may result in more than one box, is that elements may be broken at the end of a line (for inline elements), at the end of a column or at the end of a page and create further boxes in the next line, column or page. The properties of this module deal with the contents of the border area and with the background of the content, padding and border areas.
See also: the Cascading Style Sheets home page
RPC and REST: Dilemma, Disruption, and Displacement
Steve Vinoski, IEEE Internet Computing
Previous articles in this column have explored problems with the remote procedure call (RPC) abstraction and explained how the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style is one alternative that can yield a superior approach to building distributed systems. Because RPC is inherently tied to programming language abstractions, the May/June 2008 column also investigated multilingual programming, in which developers choose languages according to how well they actually fit the problem at hand, rather than the typical approach of choosing a popular general-purpose language and bending it to fit the problem. Choosing the right language and teaming it with a network programming style like REST can obviate the need for problematic techniques like RPC, thus letting developers build distributed systems both conveniently and correctly... Whether RESTful HTTP will continue to displace RPC-oriented systems within the enterprise isn't ultimately just a matter of whether one approach is technically "better" than the other. The technology-adoption life cycle clearly indicates that such evaluations are relative. Technology choice is never black-and-white, and in the big picture, the time we spend arguing for one technology over another based on pure technical merit is, frankly, largely wasted. It ultimately comes down to cost—if RESTful HTTP can indeed yield "good enough" integration solutions that cost less to develop and maintain, it will slowly displace heavier, more costly RPC-oriented approaches in more and more enterprise scenarios. As Christensen, Moore, and others have so clearly explained for us, such changes are inevitable, regardless of any technical arguments sustaining technology fans might try to muster to prevent them.
Selected from the Cover Pages, by Robin Cover
Vendors Publish Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Standard
Enterprise Content Management vendors EMC Corporation, IBM Corporation, and Microsoft Corporation have announced the publication of Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), distributed as a ZIP archive with four prose documents and a collection of schemas, WSDLs, and XML instances. According to the published Introduction, the CMIS standard is intended to "define a domain model and set of bindings, such as Web Service and REST/Atom that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management repositories/systems. The CMIS interface is designed to be layered on top of existing Content Management systems and their existing programmatic interfaces. It is not intended to prescribe how specific features should be implemented within those CM systems, nor to exhaustively expose all of the CM system's capabilities through the CMIS interfaces. Rather, it is intended to define a generic/universal set of capabilities provided by a CM system and a set of services for working with those capabilities..." CMIS uses Web Services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable applications to interoperate with multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories by different vendors... Alfresco has now announced the availability of the first Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification draft implementation from Alfresco Labs. The Draft CMIS Implementation is freely available for download. It offers support for the CMIS REST and Web Services bindings allowing client applications to connect to, navigate, read, and create content against the Alfresco content repository... An announcement from Open Text reports that Open Text has worked with SAP AG to create a prototype that uses the CMIS standard to manage content from SAP applications with Open Text Enterprise Library Services... On September 10, 2008, OASIS member companies submitted a proposed charter for a new OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Technical Committee. Based upon Version 0.5 of the CMIS specification, the TC would "define a domain model including a data model and abstract capabilities for Content Management (CM) and a set of bindings that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management Repositories/systems and that can be implemented by content repositories and enable interoperability across repositories."
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