Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Thursday, 11 September 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:
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

Headlines

MarkMail System Adds 2.3 Million Emails from NetBeans and OpenOffice.org
DSRL: A New Standard That Can Remove the English-Fluency Tax on XML
SOA with Document-Centric XML Processing
Delhi Transit Routing Interoperability Pilot (D-TRIP)
JSP TagLib, JSON, and Ajax: Auto-Complete and Cascading Drop-Down Controls

MarkMail System Adds 2.3 Million Emails from NetBeans and OpenOffice.org
Staff, Joint CollabNet and MarkMail Announcement

"MarkMail announced that it has joined forces with CollabNet, the leading provider of solutions for distributed software development and host operator for several Sun Microsystems, Inc. open-source communities, to incorporate more than 2.3 million email messages from NetBeans and OpenOffice.org into the MarkMail system. These high profile projects utilize CollabNet solutions to simplify distributed development, enable global collaboration and leverage on-demand development resources. Contributors to these software initiatives can now harness the power of MarkMail to query message archives in order to find technical information, research historical decision making, analyze and understand trends, and locate experts for a wide range of technical topics. The NetBeans project is a vibrant community of over 500,000 members where people from around the world have the ability to ask questions, give advice, make a wide variety of contributions and ultimately share in the success of NetBeans products. Also integrated into the MarkMail archives are group messages from OpenOffice.org, a community in excess of one million volunteer and sponsored contributors who develop, translate, support and promote the leading open-source office productivity suite. Its file format, the OpenDocument Format, an ISO standard, has fundamentally revolutionized the ecology of electronic documents and is now being used or considered for use by dozens of national and regional governments and enterprises around the world. The OpenOffice.org project is sponsored by Sun Microsystems, which is the primary contributor of code, but other contributors include IBM, Redflag CH 2000, and a growing international team of companies, independent organizations and individuals. MarkMail is a free Internet service for searching large, million-message mailing list archives using XML, XQuery, and MarkLogic Server. MarkMail has huge advantages over traditional search engines. Each email is stored internally as an XML document, and accessed using XQuery. All searches, faceted navigation, analytic calculations, and HTML page renderings are performed by a small MarkLogic Server cluster running against millions of messages.

See also: the blog

DSRL: A New Standard That Can Remove the English-Fluency Tax on XML
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Technical

"I see from a mail out from the Japanese Secretariat of SC34 today that IS 19757-8, Information technology—Document Schema Definition Languages (DSDL) — Part 8: Document Semantics Renaming Language (DSRL) has been approved as a standard by national votes and is ready for publication. Congratulations to editor Martin Bryan, who also has an open-source XSLT-based implementation available. DSRL is the kind of standard that really needs to be part of the furniture, because it provides a really simple solution to a couple of really important problems. The first problem is not one that English-speakers face. We live in an age of standard schemas. It is supposed to be a good thing when the whole world can get behind a common standard. However, one of the selling points of XML is how beneficial it is for people to be able have documents with comprehensible tags rather than obscure codes. A Spanish speaker can use element names with ñ and a Chinese can make XML documents completely in Chinese and they don't need to know any English or use any alphabetic characters. Can you see the contradiction there? If you have an international standard using English, it won't be comprehensible to our Chinese, or at least it will be comprehensible as an obscure code again depending on the familiarity of the words. This is not an abstract issue. The Chinese office standard UOF uses Chinese characters for its element names. Murata-san gave a great presentation about three years ago at the XML conference in Amsterdam where he showed the RELAX NG schemas he had made for Japanese local government use: all Japanese element names. And one of the concerns raised by Malaysia and others about OOXML was (IIRC) that its use of contractions made it impossible to use standard dictionaries to figure out what tag names mean... It will be interesting to see whether DSRL eventually gets much buy-in. It is one of those standards which needs to be in place ready for use (it would have been great to add to OOXML, and perhaps still would be) if the call comes, but is not guaranteed of adoption. I like it because it follows my strategy of neutralization which is that many problems exist merely because the infrastructure forces an unnecessary choice at a point: in this case the choice between a supra-national standard schema and Native Langauage Markup.

See also: DSRL as part of DSDL

SOA with Document-Centric XML Processing
Jimmy Zhang, XML Journal

This article introduces the concept of document-centric XML processing and a set of emerging document-centric capabilities such as cutting, splitting, and splicing documents at the byte level. It also explains how it solves one of the most fundamental technical issues hampering enterprise SOA and XML application development: the redundant serialization and de-serialization of object-oriented XML processing models such as DOM... After reading many great articles posted on The Code Project, it seems to me that many readers in the community are career-long, ardent practitioners of the object-oriented methodology. In my view, OO may not always be the right tool for the job. The fact that the serialization/de-serialization problem becomes invisible when you approach XML processing from a pure object-oriented perspective tells me that this design approach has practical limitations. In the world of distributed computing, the consensus is that objects don't distribute well across the process boundary (e.g., across the network). The first part of this article series introduced VTD-XML as a memory-efficient, high-performance XML parser with integrated indexing and XPath. Virtually every technical benefit of VTD-XML is, one way or another, the result of non-extractive parsing, meaning the original XML text is loaded in memory and fully preserved. However, the most important benefits of VTD-XML—the ones that truly set it apart from other XML processing models—lie in its unique ability to manipulate XML document content at the byte level... This article describes how VTD-XML fundamentally solves the common issue of DOM and SAX. The simplest problem, in my view, is also the biggest problem, not just because it affects everyone, but it is so deep that you have gotten used to it already. This is where VTD-XML again stands out. Be it parsing, indexing, modifying, cutting, splitting, or splicing XML documents, VTD-XML excels in virtually every aspect imaginable, while breaking new ground in others. But, to reap the full benefit of VTD-XML, you first need to step out of the comfort zone of object-oriented thinking and start to think of XML as documents. As the world of IT transitions toward a service-oriented architecture, I am confident that you will discover, in many ways, that the "document-centric" approach to XML processing naturally lends itself to designing and implementing your SOA infrastructure. To me, this is why VTD-XML is the future of XML processing and why the best is to yet to come.

Delhi Transit Routing Interoperability Pilot (D-TRIP)
Staff, OGCand GIS Development Pvt Ltd Joint Announcement

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) joins GIS Development Pvt Ltd (India) in a Call for Sponsorship and Participation in the Delhi Transit Routing Interoperability Pilot (D-TRIP). This is an OGC Interoperability Initiative to advance OGC's open framework for geospatial data and systems interoperability and sharing in the context of transportation circulation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, India. The Pilot will demonstrate best practices and standards enabling interoperability among diverse information resources used for transportation routing. The routing problems will focus on India's National Capital Region and will involve interacting networks that differ in scale (nation, state, region, local), built environment (urban, suburban, rural), and purpose (passenger, freight). The Delhi metropolitan area, known as the National Capital Region (NCR), is the home to about 17 million people, who travel using 11.2 million vehicles, over 3,000 buses and a host of rail lines. Transportation challenges are underscored by the statistic that due to congestion, NCR residents lose nearly 420 million person-hours every month to commuting between home and work. While the region's transportation infrastructure is undergoing rapid modernization and expansion, the increasing pressure of large-scale migration from rural areas along with growing commercial activity demands not only investments in increasing the amount of transportation resources, but also investment in making existing options more efficient. DTRIP will use Geography Markup Language (GML) version 3.2.1 which is available as OGC Document 07-036, subject to corrections and revisions documentation.

JSP TagLib, JSON, and Ajax: Auto-Complete and Cascading Drop-Down Controls
Brian J. Stewart, IBM developerWorks

Two key technologies enable next-generation Web sites: Ajax and JSON. Business-line applications can benefit from these technologies to provide more intuitive and responsive user interfaces. This article describes how to add Ajax and JSON to Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) Web applications by building reusable JSP TagLib controls based on Ajax. Within the article, I show how to build a cascading drop-down control that dynamically populates values in an HTML SELECT control based on other form field values. I also describe how to build an auto-complete control, similar to Google Suggest, that displays a suggestion list that is updated in real time as a user types. You'll build the controls by integrating JSON, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and Java EE technologies... Business-line applications can significantly benefit from Ajax-based controls thanks to the improved user experience and more responsive and intuitive user interfaces. The code isn't tremendously complex; you just need to integrate the key blocks (JavaScript, CSS, and J2EE technologies) to build the Ajax-enabled JSP controls.


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