Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Tuesday, 20 October 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:
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

Headlines

OMG Board Approves Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2 Revision
Extensible Presentation Language (XPL) and Type Resolution Protocol (XPL/TRP)
Maven and Chemistry Strike Back: Maven Archetype as CMIS Labs and Toolkit
Spring 3.0 Framework for Java to Debut
Host-Meta: Web Host Metadata
Zoho Builds Bridge Between Projects Application and Google Apps

OMG Board Approves Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2 Revision
Stephen White, OMG Announcement

The Object Management Group (OMG) announced that the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) Version 2 Revised Submission, with finalizations and revisions, was approved by the OMG Board of Directors at a recent meeting in San Antonio, TX. The Submission Team OMG Submitters included: Axway, International Business Machines, MEGA International, Oracle, SAP AG, Unisys Co-Authors BizAgi, Bruce Silver Associates, IDS Scheer, Model Driven Solutions, Software AG, and TIBCO Software. The FTF Beta 1 for Version 2.0 (August 2009) is available online as a 496-page PDF document (OMG Document Number: dtc/2009-08-14). The FTF Recommendation and Report for this specification will be published on June 21, 2010.

"The BPMN specification provides a notation and model for Business Processes and an interchange format that can be used to exchange BPMN Process definitions (both domain model and diagram layout) between different tools. The goal of the specification is to enable portability of Process definitions, so that users can take Process definitions created in one vendor's environment and use them is another vendor's environment... BPMN is constrained to support only the concepts of modeling that are applicable to Business Processes. This means that other types of modeling done by organizations for business purposes is out of scope for BPMN...

While BPMN shows the flow of data (Messages), and the association of data artifacts to Activities, it is not a data flow language. In addition, operational simulation, monitoring and deployment of Business Processes are out of scope of this specification. BPMN 2.0 may be mapped to more than one platform dependent process modeling language, e.g., WS-BPEL 2.0. This document includes a mapping of a subset of BPMN to WS-BPEL 2.0. Mappings to other emerging standards are considered to be separate efforts. The specification utilizes other standards for defining data types, expressions and service operations. These standards are XML Schema, XPath, and WSDL, respectively..."

See also: the OMG announcement

Extensible Presentation Language (XPL) and Type Resolution Protocol (XPL/TRP)
David Ryan and Esmond Pitt (eds), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF 6lowpan/6lowApp Working Groups have published an initial version -00 Internet Draft for Extensible Presentation Language (XPL) and Type Resolution Protocol (XPL/TRP). The 6lowApp application area presents extreme challenges in respect of processing power, storage, bandwidth, device lifetime, and by implication requires extreme compactness in protocol/schema/type definition, and extreme flexibility in protocol versioning...

The two major components of the proposal are as follows: (1) XPL, a powerful Extensible Presentation Language which is used both at protocol design time and by applications at runtime via very simple and small code libraries to communicate both primitives and compound types. XPL creates an internally consistent directed graph, which may be cyclic, to define complete versioned type systems to be stored with (or notionally with) an application or device. (2) XPL/TRP, a compact Type Resolution Protocol, in turn provides (i) dynamic negotiation of protocols and their constituent types between disparate devices; (ii) protocol versioning all the way down to the type level; and (iii) dynamic discovery of device capabilities and versions. An XPL device is able to describe and communicate its own application protocol. All these features are built-in to the protocol and intrinsic to its operation, rather than being extra-cost additions to it.

XPL was created to combine (i) the extensibility provided by XML and XML Schema, (ii) the ability to describe and encode binary information like IDL+IOP and ASN.1, (iii) the ability to create remote procedure call services like CORBA, and (iv) to be inherently 'version-aware', to ensure that a change to one aspect of the system did not create cost across the whole network..."

Maven and Chemistry Strike Back: Maven Archetype as CMIS Labs and Toolkit
Gabriele Columbro, Blog

"CMIS is cool indeed, and especially working on it with Open Source tools like Alfresco, Maven and Chemistry can result in quite a bit of fun. I've been working quite a lot lately on producing some sample and training material [...] so I decided to mix and match the two things I can do best: (1) using my beloved Apache Maven; (b) using the Chemistry AtomPub TCK (former Alfresco CMIS TCK) that we contributed to ASF to provide high level access to the CMIS ReST API. This effort turned out to be quite productive as in a couple of days of work I was able to: (a) develop a Labs framework which wraps Chemistry TCK embedded CMISClient, (b) provide an easy CMIS 0.62 application(s) scaffolding platform using a Maven multimodule project, and (c) produce and release a Maven archetype which is now hosted our partner Sourcesense repositories and can be used as CMIS launchpad / labs / toolkit. Trying it is very easy... All the nice tracing and validation features of the Chemistry TCK are exposed, once that you configured the POM to point to a proper CMIS 0.62 compliant server...

It's a beginning but I believe it's a very nice tool to overcome the somehow still steep learning curve around CMIS, so I warmly suggest you start installing the VM and the archetype and play around with it, and even use it as start for your integration/contribution projects..."

See also: CMIS references

Spring 3.0 Framework for Java to Debut
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

"Spring 3.0, a major upgrade to the popular open source Java development framework, is being introduced Monday by SpringSource, featuring full REST support for rich Web applications as well as an expression language. SpringSource, which recently was acquired by VMware, also is announcing SpringSource tc Server Developer Edition, offering a runtime environment for building Spring applications. And tc Server is compatible with the Apache Tomcat Java application server..."

According to the announcement: "Spring 3.0 removes the complexity from enterprise Java without compromising developer programming power. Developers can gain further efficiencies when using the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite, the best development environment for building Spring-powered enterprise Java applications, which has been updated to support new Spring 3.0 functionality... Spring 3.0 enables developers and organizations to build the latest rich web and service-based solutions on a mature, extensively tested and open application platform. The newest version of the platform features simpler development of rich web applications with full REST support as well as streamlined configuration of Spring beans and a new expression language. Since Spring 3.0 is backwards compatible with Spring 2.5, the upgrade process is quick and easy..."

See also: the announcement

Host-Meta: Web Host Metadata
Eran Hammer-Lahav (ed), IETF Internet Draft

An initial version -00 IETF Internet Draft Host-Meta: Web Host Metadata has been released. The memo describes a method for locating host-specific metadata for the Web using a "well-known location" XRD document.

The document was originally proposed in the I-D "Defining Well-Known URIs," edited by Hammer-Lahav and Mark Nottingham. That draft was changed from a single document-based list of metadata links to a registry of well-known locations documents under a fixed path prefix. This "Host-Meta: Web Host Metadata" draft redefines the purpose and syntax of the host-meta document.

"It is increasingly common for Web-based protocols to require the discovery of policy or metadata before making a request. For example, the Robots Exclusion Protocol specifies a way for automated processes to obtain permission to access resources; likewise, the W3C Recommendation "Platform for Privacy Preferences" tells user-agents how to discover privacy policy beforehand.

While there are several ways to access per-resource metadata (e.g., HTTP headers, WebDAV's PROPFIND, the overhead associated with them often precludes their use in these scenarios. In addition, there is no URI or resource available to associate host metadata with which lead some protocols use the root HTTP resource for this purpose. When this happens, it is common to designate a "well-known location" for such metadata, so that it can be easily retrieved... Web protocols have a wide range of metadata requirements. However, it is common for Web protocols to define metadata that is concise, does not require complex or custom syntax, and does not justifies the registration and retrival of multiple protocol-specific "well-known locations". This memo defines a simple, general-purpose metadata document for an entire authority, as defined by RFC 3986..."

See also: 'Defining Well-Known URIs'

Zoho Builds Bridge Between Projects Application and Google Apps
Clint Boulton, eWEEK

"Zoho continues its integration with Google Apps, allowing Zoho users to sign into the Zoho Projects application with their Google Apps account and sync content between the companies' programs. Zoho Projects is the cloud computing software maker's project management and collaboration application. The program, which got a signifcant upgrade in July 2009, let work teams plan and track tasks, milestones, reports, time sheets, priorities and dependencies. By integrating with Google Apps, Zoho Projects users will not only be able to pull in Google Docs files to share with other team members, but sync Projects milestones, meetings and tasks with Google Calendar.

According to the announcement: "Zoho today announced that Zoho Projects, the company's online project management and team collaboration application is now integrated with Google Apps. The move brings Zoho Projects to Google Apps users, complete with unified login and embeddable gadget options. Zoho Projects for Google Apps will soon be available in the Google Solutions Marketplace... Highlights of the Google Apps and Zoho Projects integration include a unified login, so Google Apps users can log into Zoho Projects using the usernames and passwords associated with their Google Apps accounts... Calendar integration. Meetings, Tasks, and Project milestones from the Zoho Projects calendar can be added automatically to a Google calendar. Zoho Projects gadget. Zoho Projects is available as a Zoho Gadget that can be embedded in iGoogle, Gmail, Google Sites and other online applications that support OpenSocial.."


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