Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Tuesday, 30 June 2009

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:
Microsoft Corporation http://www.microsoft.com

Headlines

W3C SML Notes for XLink Reference Scheme and EPR-Based Reference Schemes
Unisys Aims for Greater Security in the Cloud
An Extensible Markup Language (XML) Document Format for Indicating a Change in XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP) Resources
Draft Implementors Note on Harmonizing Certain Identifiers in CAP Implementations
Quark Works with EMC to Integrate Quark XML Author with EMC Documentum
Generating Microsoft Office Documents with the Open XML SDK
Eclipse Galileo Marks Fourth Release Train
Sun Releases NetBeans 6.7 IDE for Java, PHP
Building a SOA Suite Cluster

W3C SML Notes for XLink Reference Scheme and EPR-Based Reference Schemes
Pratul Dublish, Len Charest, Kirk Wilson (eds), W3C Notes

Members of the W3C Service Modeling Language Working Group have published two Working Group Notes relating to the SML specification. The Service Modeling Language (SML) specification extends the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and W3C XML Schema with a mechanism for incorporating into XML documents references to other documents or document fragments. Using SML, a reference to another document or document fragment is encoded by means of markup compliant with one or more reference schemes as defined in SML section 4.3. The SML specification defines one reference scheme, the SML URI Reference Scheme, which enables XML documents to use URIs to identify documents or document fragments. The SML URI Reference Scheme has the significant advantage of guaranteeing referential conformance of models that are exchanged between vendors. The SML specification does not mandate the use of any specific reference scheme, and provides an extensibility mechanism for defining new reference schemes...

The new document "The SML XLink Reference Scheme" addresses the construction of an SML reference scheme based on the XML Linking Language (XLink). Currently, this document is consistent with the Service Modeling Language (SML) 1.1 specification and the Service Modeling Language Interchange Format (SML-IF) 1.1 specification, but it may be obsoleted by future versions of these specifications.

The new specification "Framework for SML EPR-Based Reference Schemes" addresses the construction of SML reference schemes for document or document fragment references that employ WS-Addressing (WS-A) endpoint references (EPRs)... EPRs cannot simply be placed in browsers and dereferenced to locate the target resource. Processors must know how to process a given EPR and this knowledge often involves knowing (1) the operations offered by the service and (2) the protocol required for invoking the targeted operation of the service. In this sense, the use of EPRs goes beyond the standard Architecture of the Web. Therefore, use of the SML URI Reference Scheme is encouraged and remains the recommended approach for SML models. Nevertheless, it is recognized that in some cases model documents may be accessible only through a service that requires being addressed by means of an EPR...

Unisys Aims for Greater Security in the Cloud
Jeffrey Burt, eWEEK

Unisys is rolling out the first offerings in its overall Secure Cloud Solution, a cloud computing strategy that offers a high level of security. Unisys officials argue that security is the key issue that's holding back adoption of cloud computing, and that its Stealth security technology is a key differentiator as Unisys looks to gain headway in a competitive space that includes the likes of HP, IBM and Sun...

The company rolled out the first two steps in its overall cloud strategy. The first is the Unisys Secure Cloud Solution, a managed cloud service that spans Unisys' global data centers that offers full data security in an environment where multiple users share the same IT infrastructure. The Unisys cloud provides 'as a service' offerings for infrastructure, platform, software and applications..."

From the announcement: "Unisys unveiled an innovative cloud computing strategy and solutions portfolio for organizations to move enterprise application workloads securely to tailored cloud environments with greater confidence in maintaining the integrity of critical information. Underpinning this strategy is Unisys Stealth security solution, an innovative, patent-pending data protection technology initially designed for government applications and now available to commercial clients. The Unisys Stealth technology cloaks data through multiple levels of authentication and encryption, bit-splitting data into multiple packets so it moves invisibly across networks and protects data in the Unisys secure cloud. The Unisys cloud computing strategy enables clients to choose the type of data center computing services that best meet their business objectives, from self-managed, automated IT infrastructures to Unisys-managed cloud services. ."

See also: the Unisys announcement

An Extensible Markup Language (XML) Document Format for Indicating a Change in XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP) Resources
Jonathan Rosenberg and Jari Urpalainen (eds), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) Working Group have released an updated draft for an XML Document Format for Indicating a Change in XCAP Resources. The specification defines a document format that can be used to indicate that a change has occurred in a document managed by the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP). This format indicates the document that has changed and its former and new entity tags. It also can indicate the specific change that was made in the document, using an XML patch format. This format allows also indications of element and attribute content of an XML document. XCAP diff documents can be delivered to clients using a number of means, including a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) event package.

Background: The Extensible Markup Language (XML) Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP) defined in RFC 4825 is a protocol that allows clients to manipulate XML documents stored on a server. These XML documents serve as configuration information for application protocols. As an example, resource list (RFC 4662) subscriptions (also known as presence lists) allow a client to have a single SIP subscription to a list of users, where the list is maintained on a server. The server will obtain presence for those users and report it back to the client. This application requires the server, called a Resource List Server (RLS), to have access to the list of presentities. This list needs to be manipulated by clients so they can add and remove their friends as they desire... Complexities arise when multiple clients attempt to simultaneously manipulate a document, such as a presence list.

The IETF SIMPLE Working Group "focuses on the application of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP, RFC 3261) to the suite of services collectively known as instant messaging and presence (IMP). The IETF has committed to producing an interoperable standard for these services compliant to the requirements for IM outlined in RFC 2779 (including the security and privacy requirements there) and in the Common Presence and Instant Messaging (CPIM) specification, developed within the IMPP working group. As the most common services for which SIP is used share quite a bit in common with IMP, the adaptation of SIP to IMP seems a natural choice given the widespread support for (and relative maturity of) the SIP standard."

Draft Implementors Note on Harmonizing Certain Identifiers in CAP Implementations
Eliot Christian, WIS Announcement

Eliot Christian (WIS Senior Scientific Officer, World Meteorological Organization) posted an announcement for the availability of CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) Workshop Report and Workshop Document Plan. Excerpt: Together with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and OASIS, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) hosted a small, single-issue workshop at WMO in Geneva, 22-23 June 2009. This focused identifiers associated with the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP, ITU Recommendation X.1303). The Workshop produced a "Draft Implementors Note on Harmonizing Certain Identifiers in CAP Implementations", available [online]; the The Workshop Document Plan, including written contributions that were considered during the drafting, is also available...

From the Implementors Note: "Different alerting authorities, intermediaries, and alerting user groups are implementing the Common Alerting Protocol in operational applications. Especially as CAP messages become available from many different sources, implementers should harmonize how they identify alerting authorities, alerting policies, particular hazard threats/events, and particular CAP messages... Discussion during the CAP Implementation Workshop on Identifiers included: (1) general requirements such as simplicity, usability, flexibility, extensibility, scalability, and deployability; (2) considerations about distributed versus centralized management approaches of various identifier schemes; (3) considerations about long-term reliability of identifier registrars, and the availability of high- performance tools for discovering information associated with any given identifier. The Workshop developed suggestions on some specific CAP identifiers..."

See also: the Workshop Document Plan

Quark Works with EMC to Integrate Quark XML Author with EMC Documentum
Staff, Quark Announcement

"Quark has announced its work with EMC to integrate Quark XML Author with the EMC Documentum enterprise content management solution to bring easy XML authoring to anyone using Microsoft Word. The integration benefits organizations adopting XML in order to improve collaboration on content creation, enable content reuse, and comply with regulatory mandates such as the Federal Drug Administration's Structured Product Labeling (SPL) standard. Quark XML Author allows Microsoft Word users to create intelligent and reusable XML content with little or no training. Now Documentum users can easily and securely manage, review, and edit XML content created with Quark XML Author directly from Microsoft Word. Documentum users can also take advantage of the XML improvements within the Documentum platform, including enhanced content searching with XML Store, multi-channel publishing with XML Transformation Services, and dynamic content delivery with Dynamic Delivery Services. The combined solution eases the adoption of XML, removes complexity, and improves productivity..."

Generating Microsoft Office Documents with the Open XML SDK
Vikas Goyal, DevX.com

"Microsoft Office documents based on the older binary formats supported the preceding requirements to some extent using COM object model; however, it was complex and—because it required automating the single-threaded Office client applications—not scalable. Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) format, the default format for Office 2007 documents, overcomes both issues... The Open XML SDK provides a comprehensive set of classes that make generating and manipulating Microsoft Office documents much simpler and faster than was possible with older Office file formats.

OOXML is an XML file format specification for representing word- processing documents, presentations and spreadsheets. Microsoft created the original specification, which was later approved as an ECMA 376 and ISO/IEC 29500 standard. OOXML uses familiar technologies such as XML and ZIP. Document content resides in a file package that conforms to the Open Package Convention. An OOXML file package contains a few XML files as well as other required resources such as image files, video files, and so forth...

This article uses only a small fraction of the OpenXML SDK, but if you've ever tried to create or manipulate Word files programmatically using earlier technologies, you can probably already tell that this is a much more robust and simpler way. In addition to the scenarios shown here, the OpenXML SDK also lets you operate on comments and tracked changes stored in Word documents. In addition, the SDK contains APIs that operate on Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint documents..."

Eclipse Galileo Marks Fourth Release Train
John K. Waters, Application Development Trends

The Eclipse Foundation has announced its fourth "release train," a coordinated, simultaneous launch of a group of open-source Eclipse projects that has become an annual event. Representing a key milestone for Eclipse, this year's new release train, code named "Galileo," is the largest yet, comprising 33 projects and more than 24 million lines of code. The release includes a range of advancements in the Eclipse OSGi-based frameworks and runtimes; new support for the creation of Domain Specific Languages (DSL); and enterprise-focused features, such as new support for Mac Cocoa 32 and 64 bit, and the 2.1 version of the PHP Development Tools (PDT) project... Galileo is also the first Eclipse release train to make several major language translations available on the date of the release. The list of "language packs" available with Galileo includes: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Japanese, and Korean...

From the announcement: "Adoption of Eclipse in the enterprise continues to grow. New features in Galileo help expand the use of Eclipse by enterprise developers, including: (1) New support for Mac Cocoa 32 and 64 bit; (2) New Memory Analyzer tool to help analyze memory consumption of Java applications; (3) PHP Development Tools (PDT) 2.1 is first PHP toolkit to support the new PHP 5.3 language release, including namespaces and closures; (4) New Mylyn WikiText support for editing and parsing wiki markup; (5) New XSL tooling for XSL editing and debugging; (6) Developer productivity improvements to Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT) report designer and performance... EclipseRT is the set of Eclipse technologies that provide OSGi-based frameworks and runtimes useful in building software systems. The Galileo release includes a dedicated category of EclipseRT components including elements from Equinox, RAP, RCP, Riena, BIRT, Swordfish, EclipseLink, ECF and EMF..."

See also: the Eclipse Galileo Release

Sun Releases NetBeans 6.7 IDE for Java, PHP
Sean Michael Kerner, InternetNews.com

For most developers, the IDE (define) is where many start their coding efforts. Yet an IDE itself is just a development tool, and developers still require a place to host their source code. It's a gap that Sun is hoping to bridge with the release of its new NetBeans 6.7 IDE, which includes integrated support for Sun's Project Kenai. Kenai is Sun's collaborative hosting site for free and open source projects. In addition to Kenai support, NetBeans 6.7 includes improved support for PHP and Apache Maven, enabling both Java and PHP developers to utilize the new IDE. Sun's latest IDE release comes barely a week after rival Eclipse put out its major release and as Oracle's acquisition of Sun looms near... Though Eclipse is a competitive IDE effort to NetBeans, [Tori Wieldt, NetBeans's marketing manager] does not see NetBeans as being in a "head to head" competition with Eclipse. "We know developers use a variety of tools, and many developers use more than one IDE," Wieldt said: "We want to provide them with another tool, one that supports Java technology first and best. The NetBeans IDE just works after one download, and developers have responded positively to that."

From the release overview: "NetBeans IDE 6.7 is integrated with Project Kenai, a collaborative environment for developers to host open-source projects. With Kenai and the NetBeans IDE, a team of developers is able to create projects, check out, edit, debug, build, discuss, and commit code, all through one easy-to-use interface... The release also builds on the success of NetBeans 6.5 with native support for Maven; GlassFish, issue tracker and Hudson integrations; and enhancements to Java, PHP, Ruby, Groovy and C/C++. Highlights of the 6.7 release include support for JavaScript 1.7, Ruby Remote Debugging, and integration of the Java ME SDK 3.0..."

Building a SOA Suite Cluster
Antony Reynolds, Blog

"Having spent a couple of weeks working on a SOA Suite cluster thought I would share some thoughts around clustering and SOA Suite. Clustering of both BPEL Process Manager and Oracle Service Bus is relatively straightforward but there are a few gotchas. Both BPEL and SOA Suite are stateless in the way they implement clustering, however BPEL does of course persist state to a database... Both BPEL and OSB clusters expect to be fronted by a load balancer. Both can provide load balancing through a front end web server but a hardware load balancer is the best approach...

A BPEL cluster is effectively defined by a shared dehydration store. Synchronous interactions must be processed within a single BPEL server instance, as the client has connected to a socket and expects a response on that same socket. Asynchronous interactions are like any other long running BPEL process and may start processing on one node and then have processing resumed on another node, either due to failure or some other event. The dehydration store (an oracle RAC database in the example above) provides a common location for process state that allows any BPEL instance to resume execution of a process instance... Configuring a cluster is a bit more involved than configuring a single instance, but it is not massively more complicated and it does provide both scalability and high availability. Both BPEL and OSB scale linearly with increased nodes. The only limitation on BPEL is the load on the backend dehydration store..."

See also: BPEL references


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