Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Wednesday, 06 January 2010

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

OASIS Charter Proposal for WS-Calendar TC and Common Scheduling Specification
Social Networking Web Sites: Build an OAuth-Enabled Desktop Twitter Client
Filtering Location Notifications in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
Microsoft Joins W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics Effort
REST: Tying AJAX to the Cloud
Google's OpenSocial Fueling Atlassian's SaaS Development Shift
Gartner To Acquire Burton Group

OASIS Charter Proposal for WS-Calendar TC and Common Scheduling Specification
Staff, OASIS Announcement

Update: "OASIS Web Services Calendar (WS-Calendar) TC to Create Common Scheduling Standard."

OASIS members have submitted a draft charter for a proposed Web Services Calendar (WS-Calendar) Technical Committee. As proposed, the WS-Calendar TC will start work with the canonical XML serialization of the updated iCalendar (IETF RFC 5545) specification, referred to as iCalendar XML Representation, as developed by the XML Technical Committee in the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect). The draft charter was presented by representatives from CalConnect, NIST, LonMark International, TIBCO Software, JP MorganChase, Siemens, Universal Devices, Cox Software Architects, and University of North Carolina.

"The committee will deliver a standard schema and semantics for schedule and interval information for use in other web services. This specification will be derived from and compatible with the existing iCalendar XML specification and offer some or all of the functionality of that specification. The completed specification should include a standard for referring to instances of iCalendar XML within a larger payload, as well as a means to refer to objects external to the iCalendar XML instances. A single calendar object may be referenced by multiple contracts. A series of calendar events may reference a single contract. The committee will deliver a specification for creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting calendar events on a schedule. This specification will be based on the forthcoming calendar web service specifications developed by CalConnect. Geoposition is an optional component of the iCalendar XML structure. Several of the use cases would benefit from geo-location. Some benefit more from a point, and some from a region or polygon. The committee work will include recommendations on how to reference geospatial information, both point and polygon, from within schedule and interval components...

Background: "One of the most fundamental components of negotiating services is agreeing when something should occur, and in auditing when they did occur. Short running services have traditionally been handled as if they were instantaneous, and thereby dodged this requirement through just-in-time requests. Longer running processes may require significant lead times. When multiple long-running services participate in the same business process, it may be more important to negotiate a common completion time than a common start time. Central coordination of such services reduces interoperability as it requires the coordinating agent to know the lead time of each service....

For human interactions and human scheduling, the well-known iCalendar format is used: Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar). Today, there is no equivalent standard for web services. As an increasing number of physical processes are managed by web services, the lack of a similar standard for scheduling and coordination of services becomes critical. The goal of WS-Calendar is to adapt the existing specifications for calendaring and apply them to develop a standard for how schedule and event information is passed between and within services. The standard should adopt the semantics and vocabulary of iCalendar for application to the completion of web service contracts..."

Social Networking Web Sites: Build an OAuth-Enabled Desktop Twitter Client
Xiaobo Yang, IBM developerWorks

"OAuth is an open protocol that enables users to share their protected resources among different Web sites, without risking exposure. OAuth is an ideal candidate for mashing up today's social networking Web sites like Twitter. A Web site adopting OAuth as one of its authentication protocols will enhance the privacy and security for users. There are three key players in OAuth: user, consumer, and service provider...

This series of articles introduces OAuth, an open protocol which enables users to share their private data between different Web sites along with their credentials, but only expose the data on the original Web site where it is held. This first article will give an introduction to OAuth, followed by an example of a desktop application that allows users to update their Twitter status using OAuth.

Part 2 in the series will demonstrate how to develop a more practical OAuth-enabled Twitter Web client. The final article will guide you through how to deploy the Web application developed in Part 2 to the Google App Engine (GAE)..."

Filtering Location Notifications in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
Rohan Mahy, Brian Rosen, Hannes Tschofenig (eds), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Geographic Location/Privacy (GEOPRIV) Working Group have published an updated version of the specification Filtering Location Notifications in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). This document describes filters that limit asynchronous location notifications to compelling events, designed as an extension to RFC 4661, an XML-based format for event notification filtering, and based on RFC 3856, the SIP presence event package. The resulting location information is conveyed in existing location formats wrapped in the Presence Information Data Format Location Object (PIDF-LO).

RFC 4661 ("An Extensible Markup Language (XML)-Based Format for Event Notification Filtering") specifies an XML document format for SIP resource state changes. The SIP event notification framework describes the usage of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for subscriptions and notifications of changes to a state of a resource. The document does not describe a mechanism whereby filtering of event notification information can be achieved. Filtering is a mechanism for defining the preferred notification information to be delivered and for specifying triggers that cause that information to be delivered. In order to enable this, a format is needed to enable the subscriber to describe the state changes of a resource that cause notifications to be sent to it and what those notifications are to contain.

The 'Filtering Location Notifications' specification defines a new event filters and describes others using existing mechanisms that may be relevant to a subscriber in the context of location filtering. For example: the Device moves more than a specified distance since the last notification; the Device exceeds a specified speed; the Device enters or exits a region, described by a circle or a polygon; one or more of the values of the specified address labels have changed for the location of the Device [example, the value of the 'A1' civic address element has changed from 'California' to 'Nevada']; the type of location information being requested; the rate at which location information delivery is desired..."

Background: "This document focuses on the event notification paradigm. Event notifications are technical more complex since location may be measured as a continuous gradient and unlike notifications using discrete-valued quantities, it is difficult to know when a change in location is large enough to warrant a notification. Event notifications can be used with filters that allows the number of notifications to be reduced. The mechanism described in this document defines an extension to RFC 4661, which limits location notification to events that are of relevance to the subscriber. These filters persist until they are changed with a replacement filter. The frequency of notifications necessary for various geographic location applications varies dramatically. The subscriber should be able to get asynchronous notifications with appropriate frequency and granularity, without having to issue a large number of notifications that are not important to the application..."

Microsoft Joins W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics Effort
Kurt Mackie, Application Development Trends

"Microsoft is joining the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group. The company announced its aim of improving future versions of the W3C's scalable vector graphics (SVG) recommendation, currently at version 1.1. The nonprofit W3C's SVG recommendation is a document that describes two-dimensional graphics processing using XML. The technology can be used for Web graphics, animation and user interfaces...

Lately, Microsoft has been leaning more toward standards compliance with its browser, especially with IE 8, which still lacks native SVG support. In particular, Microsoft contributed test cases to the W3C's working group on cascading style sheets as it developed IE 8. In a statement, Microsoft suggested it plans to do more such work with the W3C: 'Making the Web easier for developers continues to be important and we will continue to contribute to development of HTML5, along with other popular Web standards; and we bring a unique value—the rigor of modern software engineering to the process. Just the other month, we were asked to bring the same expertise that we brought to the CSS 2.1 test suite to the HTML5 working group to lead the Testing Task Force, so that, for the first time for a major standard, everyone in the W3C will agree on a holistic test to measure implementation instead of these interesting but not particularly valuable subsets of tests'...

Standards tend to be a moving target for browser makers. A spokesperson for Google said by phone that it's important for browser makers to put standards-based features into browsers as soon as possible. He added that the latest trend has been to support the canvas HTML5 element for graphics. Apple introduced canvas as part of its WebKit rendering engine, but canvas is separate from the W3C's SVG recommendation..."

REST: Tying AJAX to the Cloud
Martin Heller, InfoWorld

In this article the author elaborates on how he sees 2010 as the year of AJAX and REST services: "First, I'd like to elaborate on the issue of "the cloud" vs. "the server." From an application development perspective, it doesn't matter where a given service resides. It could be running on the same machine, the same LAN, the same WAN, or somewhere on the Internet. It could be running on a shared server, a virtual private server, a dedicated server, a server farm, a cluster of servers, a grid of servers, or a cloud of servers...

What matters from a programming standpoint is how you call the service, how you parse the responses, and how you deal with error conditions. What matters from a production standpoint is how responsive, reliable, and scalable the service is, day in and day out. I divide services into three general categories: XML Web services, RESTful services, and other services. The "other" category includes all sorts of important protocols, such as EDI, HL7, and various binary protocols. Within XML Web services, I include XBRL, which has an extra layer or five to support accounting standards.

In the past year or so, I've seen more and more RESTful services offered. I've also seen the connectivity emphasis in development systems that I like, such as Ruby on Rails, shift from XML Web services to RESTful services...."

Google's OpenSocial Fueling Atlassian's SaaS Development Shift
John K. Waters, Application Development Trends

"Google's OpenSocial is fueling 'a major evolutionary shift' in the development space around Software as a Service (SaaS), claims Australian collaboration and development tool maker Atlassian. Development teams that were once "paranoid about having their source code hosted" are moving increasingly towards SaaS, said Michael Knighten, Atlassian's director of hosted services, because of the open set of APIs for Web-based social network apps that Google originated...

Atlassian's newly released Confluence 3.1 enterprise wiki/collaboration tool supports OpenSocial-compliant gadgets in pages and blog posts. It's also designed to serve up its own gadgets for use in any Atlassian solution or other OpenSocial-compliant Web application. OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for Web-based social network apps, which Google developed. Apps implementing OpenSocial APIs can work with any social network...

Atlassian is a long-time advocate of the OpenSocial standard for enterprise environments. The latest version of the company's hosted development tool suite, JIRA Studio, also supports OpenSocial. JIRA Studio was actually the company's first OpenSocial container and publisher. It combines a bug tracker, a wiki, a repository viewer, and a code review tool with the open-source Subversion version control software to deliver an integrated hosted (SaaS) development suite..."

See also: Confluence Version 3.1

Gartner To Acquire Burton Group
Jeffrey Schwartz, Redmondmag.com

Gartner announced that it has agreed to acquire Burton Group, a smaller but well-regarded IT research and advisory services firm, for $56 million in cash. The move comes just one month after Gartner agreed to acquire AMR Research for $64 million in cash. Burton Group, which has 41 research analysts and projected revenues of $30 million in 2009, will continue to operate as a separate subsidiary...

Burton Group spokesman: "It's looking like it will be business as usual for us; we'll retain most of our brand and our offerings won't change other than we will have this new piece to us." How that will play ou t remains to be seen. Gartner has acquired several rivals in the past including Meta Group and Dataquest, both of which were ultimately melded into the parent firm.

Burton Group is known for its enterprise-focused IT research and reference architecture designed to give Global 2000 companies options for implementing infrastructure from operating systems, network platforms, collaboration and service-oriented architectures. Its key practice areas include application development, cloud computing, infrastructure, identity and security..."

See also: the Gartner announcement


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