Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Tuesday, 09 December 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:
Primeton http://www.primeton.com

Headlines

Alfresco and Joomla Develop Integration Module Based Upon CMIS
Reference Ontology for Semantic Service Oriented Architectures V1.0
W3C Open Source Checker Promotes Mobile-Friendly Content
Atom Activity Extensions
Instant Message Disposition Notification
Apache Jackrabbit Version 1.5.0 Released
Opera 10 Alpha Shows Off Standards Support
Dirk and Nadia Design a Naming Scheme
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Access Management (WAM)
A Comparison of Description Mechanisms for URI Collections
Microsoft Debuts Early Test Version of Oxite Open Source Blogging Engine
Test Center Review: New Day Dawns for Web CMS

Alfresco and Joomla Develop Integration Module Based Upon CMIS
Staff, Alfresco Announcement

Alfresco Software and Joomlatools have announced the first integration based on Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). The Alfresco:Joomla! integration module was built using the draft CMIS REST API to allow organizations running Joomla-based web sites to access Alfresco's robust open source content management repository. Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. The company couples the innovation of open source with the stability of a true enterprise-class platform at much lower cost. Joomla is an award-winning open source web content management system (CMS), which enables organizations to build web sites and powerful online applications. Joomlatools provides consulting services and application development for Joomla. The integration, built using the CMIS REST API, will enable millions of Joomla web sites to access the powerful back-end content repository services of Alfresco, ensuring security, compliance, and auditability. Users will be able to more effectively manage, preview and track increasing volumes of content and digital assets on collaborative Joomla web sites using Alfresco's content library. Similarly Alfresco users will be able to search, publish, share, download, and edit content directly on Joomla sites. Having used both Joomla and Alfresco, Marc Alen from the Belgian Local Police provided the following comment on the integration module: "We have a wealth of experience with Joomla. At the moment we host a network of more than 120 Joomla websites for our local police regions. With IT budgets being squeezed, governments are under pressure to deliver more with less. We are confident that open-source is a long term solution that allows us to focus on lowering costs, simplicity, flexibility, and increased efficiency. We are looking forward to the integration between Alfresco and Joomla becoming an efficient low cost enterprise solution for document management."

See also: CMIS references

Reference Ontology for Semantic Service Oriented Architectures V1.0
Barry Norton, Mick Kerrigan (et al., eds), OASIS Public Review Draft

Members of the OASIS Semantic Execution Environment Technical Committee have released an approved draft of "Reference Ontology for Semantic Service Oriented Architectures Version 1.0" for public review. Public comment is invited through February 7, 2009. This Reference Ontology for Semantic Service Oriented Architectures is an abstract framework for understanding significant entities and relationships between them within a Semantically-enabled Service-Oriented environment. It may be leveraged for the development of related standards or specifications supporting that environment, as well as guiding efforts to realize concrete solutions. The Reference Ontology builds on the OASIS Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA-RM) and combines it with the key concepts of semantics that are relevant for Semantically-enabling Service Oriented Architectures. A reference model is not directly tied to any standards, technologies or other concrete implementation details. It does seek to provide a common understanding that can be used unambiguously across and between different implementations. Just as the SOA-RM, this reference ontology focuses on the field of software architecture. The concepts and relationships described may apply to other "service" environments; however, this specification makes no attempt to completely account for use outside of the software domain. Related Models include the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO), Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL), the Web Ontology Language for Services (OWL-S), and the Semantic Web Services Ontology (SWSO). Patterns fulfill the same role in Semantic- as in pre-Semantic- SOA, which is to say that they define more specific categories of service-oriented designs. The Protocols and Profiles (those considered as part of the related work) are the same as for classical SOAs. However, with respect to Specifications and Standards, we further take into account emerging Semantic Web Languages such as the OWL, RDF and RIF standards from W3C, and the WSML and SWSL de facto standards. These standards play a very important role since they are the pillars of Semantic Technologies. The Input features (Requirements, Motivation and Goals) are the same as for SOAs, with the addition that we have more emphasis on automation, as stated earlier.

See also: the announcement

W3C Open Source Checker Promotes Mobile-Friendly Content
Dominique Hazael-Massieux (et al.), W3C Software Announcement

W3C announced the release of a new online tool which makes it easier to create content designed to improve people's mobile experience using a broad range of devices. Statements of support are provided by Deutsche Telekom AG, dotMobi, Fundacion CTIC, and MobileAware. W3C now invites the community to try the W3C mobileOK checker, which is based on the newly published standard, the mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 Recommendation. The 'W3C mobileOK Checker' performs various tests on a Web Page to determine its level of mobile-friendliness. A Web Page is mobileOK when it passes all the tests. Compared to a regular desktop computer, a mobile device may be regarded as limited at first glance: smaller screen size, smaller processing powers, smaller amount of memory, no mouse, and so on. Compared to fixed data connections, mobile networks can be slow and often have a higher latency. Compared to a user sitting in front of his computer, the user on the go has limited time and is easily distracted. On top of these constraints, the mobile world is highly fragmented: many different devices, each of them defining a unique set of supported features. For these reasons, although most mobile devices may render Web documents, the user experience when browsing the Web on a mobile device is often poor when a Web document hasn't been designed with mobility in mind. "The new checker builds on the suite of quality assurance tools offered by W3C to help authors and authoring tool developers create clean content," said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. "Clean content offers a number of benefits to authors and users alike. The mobileOK checker does a nice job helping you improve your content one step at a time. Your mobile audience will thank you each time you improve your score." As shown in the mobileOK Basic 1.0 Tests implementation report, there are already several mobileOK sites, including the Google search engine and the mobile version of the Wikipedia Web site. In addition to other mobileOK content portals, newspapers and phone books, a few tools are already known to generate mobileOK content, such as Wordpress' mobile plugin. W3C anticipates that this tool will make it easier for authoring tool developers in particular to make significant strides towards reaching the global mobile community. If you wish to validate specific content such as markup validitation, or RSS/Atom feeds, or CSS stylesheets, or to find broken links, there are other validators and tools available.

See also: the W3C mobileOK Checker

Atom Activity Extensions
Martin Atkins (ed), Community Draft

An initial community draft was announced for "Atom Activity Extensions," produced by Martin Atkins. This is an early draft, designated as experimental. The document presents an extension that allows activities on social objects to be expressed within the Atom Syndication Format ('The Atom Syndication Format') published as RFC 4287. For the purpose of this specification, an "activity" is a description of an action that was performed at some instant in time by some actor (the "subject"), usually on some social object (the "object"). An activity feed is therefore a feed of such activities. An activity may also have an "indirect object". The indirect object is considered for the purposes of this specification to be a modifier of the verb and does not exist as a first-class object. It is expected that in many cases consumers of feeds containing activity entries will use them to describe activities to the user as human-readable sentences such as "Joanne posted a Photo: 'My Cat'". However, the process for forming such sentences is not defined by this specification. An activity entry is an entry element as described by the Atom specification that represents an activity. The subject of the activity entry is the author of the entry. In an activity entry, the 'atom:title', 'atom:summary' and 'atom:content' elements as described by RFC 4287 must contain a human-readable description of the activity. This text will be used by general Atom processors that do not understand the activity extensions. This text may also be used by activity feed processors that do not use a known verb. Activity feed producers may use information from outside sources to choose a suitable language to use for the action description. For example, an activity feed producer responding to an HTTP request might use the HTTP Accept-Language header or a user preference otherwise determined to select a language. Activity feed producers should use 'xml:lang' as described in RFC 4287 to identify the language used in these elements if they are able to determine the language used. The time that an activity occured is represented in the 'atom:published' element within each Activity Entry. An Activity Entry must have exactly one 'atom:published' element. The time stored herein is the time that the activity occured, not the time that the associated activity object was published. The presence of the 'activity:verb' element in an 'atom:entry' element indicates that the entry is an activity entry. The 'activity:object' element contains information about the object of the activity..." Editor's note: "Right now it describes what my experimental Perl library expects to see. I do expect that it'll change quite a bit before we're done, but we've gotta start somewhere... You'll note that right now I've described only the 'post' verb in the specification. At least while we're still drafting, I think it's best to keep the Atom extension and the default schema in separate documents in order to keep the documents to a managable size. I did however draw in the 'post' verb into this spec so that I could describe the 'implied post activity' concept..."

See also: Atom references

Instant Message Disposition Notification
Eric Burger and Hisham Khartabil (eds), IETF Internet Draft

The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) announced approval of the "Instant Message Disposition Notification" specification as an IETF Proposed Standard. The document was produced by members of the IETF SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) Working Group. In many user-to-user message exchange systems, message senders often wish to know if the human recipient actually received a message or has the message displayed. Electronic Mail offers a solution to this need with Message Delivery Notifications. After the recipient views the message, her mail user agent generates a Message Delivery Notification, or MDN. The MDN is an e-mail that follows the format prescribed by RFC 3798. The fixed format ensures that an automaton can process the message. The common presence and instant messaging (CPIM) format, Message/CPIM, is a message format used to generate instant messages. The session initiation protocol, SIP (RFC 3261), can carry instant messages generated using message/CPIM in SIP MESSAGE requests. This document extends the Message/CPIM message format in much the same way Message Delivery Notifications extends Electronic Mail. This extension enables Instant Message Senders to request, create, and send Instant Message Disposition Notifications (IMDN). This mechanism works for page-mode as well as session mode instant messages. This document only discusses page-mode. Session mode is left for future standardisation efforts. This specification defines three categories of disposition types, "delivery", "processing", and "read". Specific disposition types provide more detailed information. For example, the "delivery" category includes "delivered" to indicate successful delivery and "failed" to indicate failure in delivery... Structure of XML-Encoded IMDN Payload: An IMDN Payload is an XML document that must be well formed and must be valid according to schemas, including extension schemas, available to the validater and applicable to the XML document. The IMDN Payload MUST be based on XML 1.0 and must be encoded using UTF-8. An IM Sender creates an IM, adds IMDN request information the IM Sender is interested in receiving and then sends the IM. At a certain point in time, the IM Recipient or an intermediary determines that the user or application has received, did not receive, displayed, or otherwise disposed the IM. The mechanism by which an IM Recipient determines its user has read an IM is beyond the scope of this document. At that point, the IM Recipient or intermediary automatically generates a notification message to the IM Sender. This notification message is the Instant Message Disposition Notification (IMDN). The schema allows qualified extension elements in several positions other than the "urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:imdn" namespace. To maintain forwards compatibility (newer instance documents can be used by existing consumers) the new specifications must not extend the allowable content of this specification. The backwards compatibility (existing instance documents can also be used by updated new consumers) may break if there are conflicts with the existing qualified names of extension elements and possible new specifications. The IETF may specify new extension elements within the "sub-namespace" of "urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:" for this message/ imdn+xml MIME type.

Apache Jackrabbit Version 1.5.0 Released
Jukka Zitting, Apache Announcement

Members of the Apache Jackrabbit community have announced the release of Apache Jackrabbit version 1.5.0. Apache Jackrabbit is a fully conforming implementation of the Content Repository for Java Technology API (JCR). A content repository is a hierarchical content store with support for structured and unstructured content, full text search, versioning, transactions, observation, and more. Typical applications that use content repositories include content management, document management, and records management systems. Version 1.0 of the JCR API was specified by the Java Specification Request 170 (JSR 170) and work on the JCR version 2.0 has begun in JSR 283. Apache Jackrabbit 1.5 is an incremental feature release. While remaining compatible with previous releases, Jackrabbit 1.5 introduces a number of new features, improvements and fixes to known issues. Some of the notable changes in this release include: (1) The standalone Jackrabbit server component. The runnable jackrabbit-standalone jar makes it very easy to start and run Jackrabbit as a standalone server with WebDAV and RMI access. (2) Search performance improvements. The performance of certain kinds of hierarchical XPath queries has improved notably. (3) Simple Google-style query language. The new GQL query syntax makes it very easy to express simple full text queries. (4) Transaction-safe versioning. Mixing transactions and versioning operations has traditionally been troublesome in Jackrabbit. This release contains a number of improvements in this area and has specifically been reviewed against potential deadlock issues. (5) Clustered workspace creation. A new workspace created in one cluster node will now automatically appear also in the other nodes of the cluster. (6) SPI improvements. The SPI layer introduced in Jackrabbit 1.4 has seen a lot of improvements and bug fixes, and is shaping up as a solid framework for implementing JCR connectors. (7) Development preview: JSR 283 features. We have implemented a number of new features defined in the public review draft of JCR 2.0, created in JSR 283. These new features are accessible through special "jsr283" interfaces in the Jackrabbit API. Note however that none of these features are ready for production use, and will be replaced with final JCR 2.0 versions in Jackrabbit 2.0.

See also: the Jackrabbit CMIS Sandbox

Opera 10 Alpha Shows Off Standards Support
Jim Rapoza, eWEEK

The Opera Web browser, while trailing behind Firefox and Internet Explorer in market share, is well known for being innovative and often the first to have features that are later found in other browsers. But if users are expecting to see lots of cool new features and capabilities in the recently released alpha of Opera 10, they may be disappointed. That's because, like most alpha releases, the alpha of Opera 10 is focused mainly on developers and, especially in the interface, has little or no new features. That doesn't mean that when Opera 10 eventually releases that it won't have innovative new features. But for now, this alpha release is mainly about showcasing the new Presto 2.2 browser engine and implementing support for lots of cutting-edge Web standards. As a way of showcasing its potential standards support, the alpha of Opera 10 scored a 100 on the advanced Acid3 standards test from the Web Standards Project. Currently the only other browser to achieve this score is WebKit. From a developer standpoint there is some interesting new CSS support in Opera 10 alpha, including support for Web Fonts, which make it possible to use a wide variety of fonts in a Web page simply by pointing at an online font resource. From a usability standpoint, the new features in the Opera 10 alpha are, somewhat surprisingly, rare examples of Opera introducing features that are already found in competing browsers. These include in-line spell checking (which worked well in tests), the option to choose rich HTML or plain text on a per e-mail basis and automatic updates... When first installing the alpha of Opera 10, the browser attempts to highlight new features such as the new Presto 2.2 browsing engine. While much of the core functionality of Opera 10 alpha remains the same as the current version, the browser does appear to have a cleaner and more "chrome-like" interface.

Dirk and Nadia Design a Naming Scheme
Henry S. Thompson and Jonathan Rees, W3C TAG Draft

The subtitle is "Yet another potential contribution to the URNsAndRegistries-50 finding", where issue 50 issue covers: (a) URIs for namespace names, (b) URNs and other proposed systems for "location independent" names, and (c) XML and other registries, and perhaps centralized vs. decentralized vocabulary tracking. Nadia and Dirk's work on film industry data (see Architecture of the World Wide Web section 4.2.2, 'Versioning and XML namespace policy') has been successful up to a point, but their employers, a consortium of film studios called FSC, are not happy that they have used URIs from a widely-used public film database to identify films, actors, directors, etc. [They could use a URN, of an 'fii' scheme, or other option.] The document explores the requirements space and the solution space, and concludes that in a large number of cases both Dirk and Nadia are wrong, because http-scheme URIs provide the best available solution... FSC want a web-enabled naming scheme which is identifiable, stable and reliable, and which allows delegation of naming authority and provides uniform access to metadata. So, here are the requirements in detail (1) stable: including [i] owner stability "No-one can take our URIs away from us." That is, ownership of a URI, and the authority over a URI's meaning which follows from it, continues as long as the owner wants it to; [ii] resource stability "For at least some of our URIs, we won't ever change what they are for". That is, what resource such a URI identifies shouldn't change; [ii] representation stability "For at least some of our URIs, we want to guarantee that exactly the same page will always come up". That is, the representation retrieved from such URIs shouldn't change. (2) reliable: "It's very important that our users never see a 'not found' response (as long as they're actually online)". That is, it should always be possible to get a positive response (either a representation or other definite advice about the resource) from an attempt to access the URI." (3) identifiable: "People must be able to tell by looking at one of our URIs that it is one of ours" (and) "Yes, and browsers too: URIs which are part of our scheme should be syntactically distinguishable from all other URIs". (4) transparent: it should be evident what each of their URIs is about just by looking at it (5) support delegation: Delegation means support for the transfer of naming authority (control over the meaning of URIs) for designated parts of the scheme. (6) uniform access to metadata: given a URI in the scheme it should be possible to retrieve metadata about the resource it identifies independently of the representation of that resource, if any...

See also: the W3C Tracker entry

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Access Management (WAM)
Ray Wagner, Earl Perkins, Perry Carpenter; Gartner Research Note

The Web access management market has matured. Future success in this market will require a focus on specific use cases or generalized Web access management architectures for enterprise WAM needs. Web access management (WAM) technologies have reached maturity. Future success in the WAM market will follow one of two paths: (1) Focusing on specific, narrow use cases (2) Expanding to address full-enterprise general-purpose access management needs WAM market growth is slowing, and few vendors experienced strong customer-base growth in 2007. Many experienced little or no growth. Larger vendors are positioning their WAM products as future, centralized authorization policy repositories for new enterprise applications (Web and non-Web) or as components in access management "suites." Gartner considers the WAM market a subset of the identity and access management (IAM) market. The term "IAM" covers the spectrum of tools and processes used to represent and administer digital identities, and manage and enforce access controls for those identities. WAM refers to access control engines that provide centralized authentication and authorization capabilities for Web-delivered applications. Traditionally, WAM products have also provided proprietary integration points for some non-Web applications, although the use of WAM for non-Web application access control remains limited. WAM products may also include identity administration (IA), role/rule life cycle management, audit and federation capabilities. They frequently incorporate some level of user-provisioning functionality or integration with a user-provisioning tool, and may incorporate integration with other IAM tools—for example, enterprise single sign-on (ESSO), Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) virtual private networks (VPNs), public-key infrastructure (PKI), various authentication methods and consumer fraud detection systems... The term "WAM" applies to technologies that use access control engines designed to provide centralized authentication and authorization capabilities for Web applications. WAM products may also include IA, role/rule management, and audit and federation capabilities, as well as standardized or proprietary integration points for non-Web applications. They may also incorporate some level of user-provisioning functionality, or integration with a user-provisioning tool, as well as integration with PKI or strong authentication mechanisms.

A Comparison of Description Mechanisms for URI Collections
Tony Hammond, OAI-ORE List Posting

"I've been reading up on POWDER recently (the W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources) which is currently in last call status. This is an effort to describe groups of Web resources and as such has clear similarities to the Open Archives Initiative ORE data model, which has been blogged about here before. In an attempt to better understand the similarities (and differences) between the two data models, I've put up the table which directly compares the two heavyweight contendors OAI-ORE and POWDER and also (unfairly) places them alongside the featherweight Sitemaps Protocol for reference. This is very much a draft document and I will aim to update the table based on my own further reading and on any feedback that I may get (contributions gratefully received). I'm all too aware that my understanding of the respective data models is painfully limited and I, for one, hope to profit through this exercise. There will be certainly errors which I will aim to fix as soon as I get wind of them... By the way, the ORE work especially is of interest to CrossRef members and has obvious synergies with the multiple resolution potential that DOI has long promised but not quite delivered on... ORE defines primarily an abstract model and puts out user guides for illustrative serializations. Of course, POWDER also has an abstract model but it defines explicitly two canonical bindings (XML and PDF/OWL), with the intention being that user's would largely generate the XML version and a POWDER processor would bump that up to RDF/OWL. So a fixed binding is used in POWDER, either RDF/ OWL directly or as implied by the XML. (Note that a data provider does not need to generate or understand the RDF/OWL - they would usually put out a simple XML description and leave it at that.) The bindings in ORE are not canonical nor equivalents, but are alternates. If anything, the RDF/XML presents a clear standalone description, whereas RDFa is a carrier format which piggy backs ORE on top of XHTML. (he Atom format is somewhere in between—I rather feel it was press-ganged into service. Both Atom and RDFa have extra cruft which does make it difficult to see the woods for the trees. So, an unencumbered description of ORE is best delivered in RDF/XML but folks gripe about it so much because of namespaces, and the various abbreviated syntaxes it allows. A simple bespoke XML might have made ORE clearer—like, erm, a POWDER enconding...

See also: the followup article

Microsoft Debuts Early Test Version of Oxite Open Source Blogging Engine
Paula Rooney, ZDNet News

WordPress has more competition to be. Microsoft's Codeplex team has developed an open source blogging engine that can support simple blogs and large web sites such as its own MIX Online. 'Oxite was developed carefully and painstakingly to be a great blogging platform, or a starting point for your own web site project with CMS needs,' according to Microsoft.com. Oxite, for example, offers support for pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting, gravatar support, RSS feeds at any page level, support for MetaWebLog API, a web admininstration panel and support for Open Search format allowing users to search your site using their browser's search box. It's an apha release and available under the OSI-aproved Microsoft Public License. Oxite, which was made available on December 5, 2008 is a provider-based architecture that allows users to 'swap out database and search providers,' Microsoft said, adding that SQL Server Database and local and Live search providers are included. Oxite offers support for multiple blogs per site. 'Oxite includes the ability to create and edit an arbitrary set of pages on your site. Want an 'about' page? You got it. Need a special page about your dogs, with sub-pages for each of those special animals? Yep, no worries,' Microsoft continues. 'The ability to add pages as a child of another page is all built in. The web-based editing and creation interface lets you put whatever HTML you want onto your pages, and the built-in authentication system means that only you will be able to edit them. And if that's not enough, well, you have all the code, don't you?' From the FAQ: " At the time of this post, there currently aren't any big ASP.NET MVC example applications. Oxite is meant to be a good example to learn about ASP.NET MVC. At the same time, we think it is a useful sample to get a site of your own going too... Oxite is targeted at developers who want to learn ASP.NET MVC. That said, if you're a designer, you might really like Oxite too. We work well in Visual Studio Express. This is a community project. If the community decides to build this to work well for consumers down the road we won't stop it, and then Oxite would be for you..."

See also: the Oxite web site

Test Center Review: New Day Dawns for Web CMS
Mike Heck, InfoWorld

Day Software may be best known for its CRX (Content Repository Extreme) Java Content Repository. But after testing the general release of its Communique 5.1 (CQ5) modular CMS, I think it's time to get reintroduced to the rest of what the company offers. This notable Web content manager will impress business users with drag-and-drop page design, in-context content editing, and a component library that includes Flash elements, form builders, and Google Gadget support. And it will impress IT with a nice complement of enterprise bells and whistles—from integrated BPM to hot backup, disaster recovery, and clustering capabilities. CQ5, like the previous 4.2 version, is a Java application. However, Version 5.1 has even more open associations. It was completely rewritten around Apache Sling—a Web application framework that Day incubated and then open sourced. The entirely rebuilt client application now incorporates AJAX components for a great user experience, including drag-and-drop content placement. New components, including ready-to-use forms, really speed the development of Web pages. Also, workflow and tagging have been substantially revised. Workflow now includes a full-fledged BPM engine. Plus, there are numerous infrastructure improvements for anyone looking to deploy CQ5 for an enterprise... Perhaps the most important new capability, from a Web 2.0 perspective, is the way CQ5 handles personalization. Every site visitor is potentially a registered user with a unique profile. For example, you could match profile information with tags placed on a page to deliver content tailored to the person's interest. Taking this further, each site is really a Web 2.0 portal. In my test intranet, I easily allowed each employee to add a Google Gadget to their home page. Because I knew each user's identity based on their log-in, it was easy to give them rights to upload documents or comment on a blog entry. CQ5 introduces social search—something that other CMS products usually make you buy from another vendor. I found that anonymous users got very good results. However, when the application compared previous queries of registered users who looked for the same information, the results more accurately reflected their common interests...


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