Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Friday, 11 December 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

IETF Creates HTTP State Management Mechanism (HTTPSTATE) Working Group
ISOC and W3C Collaborate to Ensure Open Global Eosystem for Web Standards
European Commission Expert Group Issues Final Report on e-Invoicing
Last Call Review for The Metalink Download Description Format
Sun Releases Java EE Version 6
W3C Outlines Roadmap for Realizing Web for Social Development
Databases and Data Access: Data in Flight
WiGig Alliance Completes Multi-Gigabit Wireless Specification

IETF Creates HTTP State Management Mechanism (HTTPSTATE) Working Group
Staff, Internet Engineering Task Force Announcement

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has formed a new 'HTTP State Management Mechanism (HTTPSTATE)' Working Group in the IETF Applications Area under Area Directors Lisa Dusseault and Alexey Melnikov. The initial WG Chairs are Jeff Hodges and Eran Hammer-Lahav.

Background: "The HTTP State Management Mechanism (aka Cookies) was originally created by Netscape Communications in their informal Netscape cookie specification, from which formal specifications RFC 2109 and RFC 2965 evolved. Those formal RFC specifications, however, were never fully implemented in practice... Compounding the problem are undocumented features (such as HTTPOnly), and varying behaviors among real-world implementations."

The new IETF working group will create a new RFC that specifies Cookies as they are actually used in existing implementations and deployments. This RFC will obsolete RFC 2109 and update RFC 2965 to the extent it overlaps or voids RFC 2109. Where commonalities exist in the most widely used implementations, the working group will specify the common behavior. Where differences exist among the most widely used implementations, the HTTPSTATE working group will document the variations and seek consensus to reduce variation by selecting among the most widely used variations...

The working group's specific deliverables are: (1) a standards-track document that is suitable to supersede RFC 2109, and likely based on the HTTP State Management Mechanism Internet Draft by Adam Barth (2) an informational document cataloguing the differences between major implementations. The HTTP State Management Mechanism I-D defines the HTTP Cookie and Set-Cookie headers, describing a way for an origin server to send state information to the user agent, and for the user agent to return the state information to the origin server... The origin server initiates a session, if it so desires, by including a Set-Cookie header in an HTTP response... A user agent returns a Cookie request header to the origin server if it chooses to continue a session. The origin server may ignore it or use it to determine the current state of the session. It may send the client a Set-Cookie response header with the same or different information, or it may send no Set-Cookie header at all..."

ISOC and W3C Collaborate to Ensure Open Global Eosystem for Web Standards
Staff, ISOC and W3C Announcement

A joint announcement by the Internet Society (ISOC) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) reports on "a donation from ISOC for the purpose of advancing the evolution of W3C as an organization that creates open Web standards. Citing strongly aligned views on the value of an open global Internet and support for the current Internet governance and management model, the Internet Society pledged to support W3C efforts to implement a more agile, inclusive, and flexible organizational structure. The announcement reflects the two organizations' shared aim of ensuring the continued growth and accessibility of the global Internet and Web, and stewardship responsibilities to ensure they continue to benefit users worldwide."

The Internet Society (ISOC) "is a non-profit organization founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy. ISOC is the organizational home of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet's premier technical standards body. With offices in Washington, D.C., and Geneva, Switzerland, it is dedicated to ensuring the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of people throughout the world..."

As described in the 'FAQ about ISOC and W3C': "ISOC and W3C believe that strong partnerships among the various organizations that form the Internet Ecosystem help ensure the stability and growth of the platform. In turn, these core standards enable people around the world to make creative use of the global network.

ISOC's donation will advance the evolution of W3C as an organization that creates open Web standards. It will support W3C efforts to implement a more agile, inclusive, and flexible organizational structure. ISOC is providing staff expertise in complementary areas and donating money to this end. ISOC's pledge of support is for USD2.5 million over three years, with both organizations working to ensure progress. ISOC's support will enable W3C's evolution which, in turn, will strengthen W3C as a community forum for building consensus around future Web standards for HTML, CSS, SVG, and other standards..."

See also: the FAQ about ISOC and W3C

European Commission Expert Group Issues Final Report on e-Invoicing
Staff, European e-Invoicing Framework Expert Group Report

A posting by Carmen Ciciriello references the publication of a European Commission Final Report of the Expert Group on e-Invoicing. This report "defines a list of business requirements which represent necessary conditions for achieving mass adoption of e-Invoicing, in particular, the widespread use of e-Invoicing by SMEs. These requirements are validated against current market reality, resulting in a number of identified gaps or areas for improvement identified in the report. A set of recommendations addressing these gaps constitutes the proposed European e-Invoicing Framework, the key deliverable of the Expert Group. The report also makes recommendations with clearly defined tasks and owners as to how this Framework could be implemented. The report, which does not necessarily represent the views of the Commission, will be open for consultation until 26 February 2010..."

EG Chair Bo Harald: "Europe is facing major challenges in the coming years as its enterprises and public sector need to become both significantly more productive and environmentally friendly. These needs are accentuated by the relative decline of population of working age and at the same time the growing demand for human resources in health and care sectors... Migration to electronic structured invoicing is the most important step we can take in this direction—both as productivity and sustainability enhancers and as a key enabler for unification and automation in procurement, payment, tax, accounting processes and audits..."

"This report of the European Commission Expert Group on e-invoicing proposes the European Electronic Invoicing Framework (EEIF) as called for in the Terms of Reference created by the European Commission when the Group was established in late 2007. The EEIF is expected to establish a common conceptual structure, including business requirements and standard(s), and propose solutions supporting the provision of e-invoicing services in an open and interoperable manner across Europe...

The EEIF sets out a vision for the future European e-invoicing environment and presents a target picture as an objective for all stakeholders... Standards for invoicing and related processes will have been widely adopted; in particular the UN/CEFACT Cross-Industry Invoice (CII) v.2 will have been implemented by the majority of trading parties. Other standards and formats will remain in use and appropriate facilities for format conversion will be readily accessible..."

Last Call Review for The Metalink Download Description Format
Anthony Bryan, Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa, Neil McNab, Peter Poeml; IETF Internet Draft

The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) has announced a Last Call Review for the specification Metalink Download Description Format based upon a request for advancement to IETF Proposed Standard. IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits final comments on this action by 2010-01-08.

From Anthony Bryan's blog article: "Most of the time, downloads just work: they are relatively small files. But, when files are larger, you are more likely to encounter errors. Errors with large downloads can be frustrating and a waste of time. That's even more true for areas with unreliable Internet connections, such as developing parts of the world. Download problems include when a server becomes overloaded, goes down, or if there are errors in transmission. Common download programs like web browsers usually don't have the capability to recover from most errors, but external download managers do. Download managers are separate programs that your browser can pass downloads to. Download managers usually include features like making use of mirrors for fail-over or download from multiple servers...

Before Metalink, downloading a large file like a Linux distribution (CD or DVD size) could involve copy & pasting various URLs for mirrors into your download manager. Once the download completed, you could manually checksum the file, if you had such a program, to verify that the download was not corrupted. If the download was corrupted, there were a few things power users could try, but most people had to start over from scratch. With Metalink, we make this process automatic. Mirror lists, P2P sources, checksums, digital signatures, and other metadata about a download are included in an XML file which download programs can read.

Checksums allow errors in a file to be repaired. Other features include enhanced security, adding multiple files to a download queue, and simultaneously downloading from multiple sources, including P2P & FTP/HTTP. Clients are enabled to work their way to a successful download even under adverse circumstances. All this can be done transparently to the human user and the download is much more reliable and efficient. Most download managers support Metalink already, but if this feature is made available in browsers like Firefox and Chrome, it will reach more people..."

Sun Releases Java EE Version 6

Darryl K. Taft "Sun Microsystems has announced the release of the Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 along with industry support from Java technology licensees including Caucho, IBM, Oracle and Red Hat. Java EE is a leading platform for web and enterprise application development and deployment...

Among the new features introduced in Java EE 6 is Profiles, which target the platform at specific application scenarios. Profiles provides more flexibility for customers, ISVs and platform vendors and allows them to better address new and existing markets. For instance, the lightweight Web Profile is designed to specifically address Web application deployment scenarios that may not require the full enterprise functionality of the broader Java EE platform, Sun said. Coupled with significant improvements to the existing specifications, and the introduction of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.1 Lite technology, the Web Profile enables Web developers to quickly and easily build applications without the need to build and manage a custom stack. In addition, developers requiring the power of the full platform can easily move from the Web Profile to the complete Java EE 6 platform..."

According to the Sun announcement: "The Java EE platform and its underlying technology specifications continue to be developed through the Java Community Process (JCP) and by extension, many different open source communities. The JCP is a collaborative community effort, which includes a large group of industry leading companies and organizations, (including Apache, Caucho, Eclipse, Fujitsu, Google, HP, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat and SAP AG) along with independent community members. Java EE is the premier platform for web and enterprise application development and deployment. Java EE 6 introduces features to increase the flexibility of the platform and enable companies to use specific application scenarios, in addition to the full enterprise platform, to help meet their use case requirements. The Java EE SDK has been downloaded more than 18 million times and the specification is supported by 28 licensees that market Java EE compatible-products. Developers can download and begin deploying Java EE applications today...

Developers familiar with Java EE programming model can now take advantage of the productivity improvements and the tremendous ease of development features introduced as part of Java EE 6 to build a range of applications—from web to enterprise. Some of the enhancements include: the introduction of Context and Dependency Injection and EJB 3.1 Lite technologies, the simplification of adding EJBs to web application war files without having to create additional packaging artifacts, the ability to drag and drop third-party frameworks through the 'web-fragments.xml' in servlets, the addition of numerous annotations across the platform to make it easier to build applications and the ability to embed EJBs into standalone applications to facilitate testing..."

W3C Outlines Roadmap for Realizing Web for Social Development
Staff, W3C Announcement

On December 08, 2009, W3C announced the publication of a "roadmap for extending the Web to rural and underprivileged communities in developing countries. The Mobile Web for Social Development (MW4D) Roadmap examines the challenges to deploying and accessing development-oriented services and surveys the technology landscape for meeting those challenges.

The Mobile Web For Social Development Roadmap identifies two major challenges: (1) barriers to Web access faced by underprivileged communities in developing countries; (2) barriers to authoring and deploying Web content, and accessing information, applications, and services on mobile phones. The roadmap first identifies the profile, needs, and requirements of people living in underprivileged communities, and the current technology gaps that prevent them to access and use Web content and services on mobile. Barriers include illiteracy, accessibility, languages, and Web inexperience. The roadmap authors recommend the development of new standards and guidelines for creating illiterate-accessible Web content and for supporting more languages on the Web. They also suggest investigating how technologies such as Widgets can make it easier to find and use new mobile Web content and services.

Barriers for authoring Web content matter as well. One important reason people in developing countries are not using the Web as much as they might is the lack of relevant local content and services. There is great potential for those people and organizations already working in the field (NGOs, civil society organizations, and development agencies) to provide new content and services. The roadmap indicates that to help promote the creation of relevant content, it is important to build capacity, raise awareness, and develop the right tools...

The roadmap authors recommend actions for these various stakeholders, including: [i] for network operators, quickly developing and expanding mobile data services; [ii] for handset manufacturers, supporting GPRS, J2ME, or text-to-speech on handsets; [iii] for policy-makers, developing policy frameworks that enforce availability of minimal data service at low-cost everywhere, or that make it easier for authors and entrepreneurs to provide content and services..."

Databases and Data Access: Data in Flight
Julian Hyde, ACM Queue

"The streaming query engine is a new technology that excels in processing rapidly flowing data and producing results with low latency... Tables are the key primitive in a relational database. A table is populated with records, each of which has the same record type, defined by a number of named, strongly typed columns. Records have no inherent ordering... Streams are the corresponding primitive in a streaming query engine. A stream has a record type, just like a table, but records flow through a stream rather than being stored. Records in a streaming system are inherently ordered, and in fact each record has a time stamp that indicates when it was created. The relational operations supported by a relational database have analogs in a streaming system and are sufficiently similar that SQL can be used to write streaming queries.

Streaming query engines are based on the same technology as relational databases but are designed to process data in flight. Streaming query engines can solve some common problems much more efficiently than databases because they match the time-based nature of the problems, they retain only the working set of data needed to solve the problem, and they process data asynchronously and continuously. Because of their shared SQL language, streaming query engines and relational databases can collaborate to solve problems in monitoring and realtime business intelligence. SQL makes them accessible to a large pool of people with SQL expertise. Just as databases can be applied to a wide range of problems, from transaction processing to data warehousing, streaming query systems can support patterns such as enterprise messaging, complex event processing, continuous data integration, and new application areas that are still being discovered..."

See also: the SQLstream web site

WiGig Alliance Completes Multi-Gigabit Wireless Specification
Staff, Wireless Gigabit Alliance Announcement

"WiGig, the organization advancing the adoption and widespread use of 60 GHz wireless technology worldwide, today announced the completion of its unified wireless specification. The WiGig specification enables high performance wireless display and audio and provides data transfer rates more than ten (10) times faster than today's wireless LANs, extending Wi-Fi technology while supporting backward compatibility with existing Wi-Fi devices. The completed specification is now ready for member review and is anticipated to be made available to WiGig adopter members in Q1 2010...

The WiGig version 1.0 specification includes the following key elements: (1) Supports data transmission rates up to 7 Gbps—more than ten times faster than the highest 802.11n rate; (2) Supplements and extends the 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) layer and is backward compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard; (3) Physical layer enables both the low power and the high performance WiGig devices, guaranteeing interoperability and communication at gigabit rates; (4) Protocol adaptation layers are being developed to support specific system interfaces including data buses for PC peripherals and display interfaces for HDTVs, monitors and projectors; (5) Support for beamforming, enabling robust communication at distances beyond 10 meters; (6) Widely used advanced security and power management for WiGig devices..."

According to Nathan Chandler's description: "WiGig will primarily be used within a single room to provide wireless connectivity between home entertainment equipment. It will enable very fast data transfers and blazing streaming media, in addition to wireless connections for cameras, laptops and more. How fast is fast? Well, WiGig will be close to 10 times faster than WiFi, and it might be fast enough to let you transfer the contents of a 25 Gigabyte Blu-ray disc in less than a minute. With afterburner-type speed like that, you can transfer data from an entire DVD in just 15 seconds. In other words, say goodbye to glitch-ridden streaming video clips and data transfers interrupted by agonizingly slow speeds..."


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