Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Monday, 01 February 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 SOA-EERP Technical Committee Approves Public Review Drafts
Web Development: IEEE Smart Grid Web Portal
Sieve Notification Using Presence Information
The Kantara Initiative for Online Identity: A One-Year Progress Report
W3C Publishes XQuery and XPath Full Text Specifications for Review
ASP.NET MVC: Web Development Renewed

OASIS SOA-EERP Technical Committee Approves Public Review Drafts
William Cox, Szu Chang, Andy Lee, James Zhang and Hong Zhou; OASIS Drafts

Members of the OASIS Service-Oriented Architecture End-to-End Resource Planning (SOA-EERP) TC have released three approved Committee Draft specifications for public review through April 02, 2010. Additionally, a supporting white paper is also available: End-to-End Resource Planning (EERP) Model and Use Case: Detailed Context and Example for SOA-EERP Technical Committee Specifications.

SOA-EERP Business Quality of Service Version 1.0 provides the specification for Business Quality of Service (bQoS) for End-to-End Resource Planning (EERP), an XML vocabulary by which a business application may communicate selected characteristics of the service it provides. EERP applies service discovery, composition, simulation, and optimization techniques in a novel way to improve business results. It models the business process and the range of potential services, then guide the selection and deployment of services based on the end-to-end business value. Modeling the business characteristics of a service is a prerequisite for estimating the business value of the process that uses those services. The business characteristics of the service defined in this bQoS specification will enable EERP to determine the varieties of optimization to be supported, and to select optimal end-to-end solution. specifies the XML vocabulary for business quality of service (bQoS), one of three Specifications for end-to-end resource planning (EERP). Business quality of service describes the business-related characteristics or attributes of a service.

SOA-EERP Business Service Level Agreement Version 1.0 presents a specification for the Business Service Level Agreement for (BSLA) for End-to-End Resource Planning (EERP), an XML vocabulary for information exchange by which a business application can manage and evaluate services with agreed business quality of service, obligations and terms. EERP applies service discovery, composition, simulation, and optimization techniques in a novel way to improve business results. It models the business process and the range of potential services, then guide the selection and deployment of services based on the end-to-end business value. Modeling the business service-level agreements to manage and evaluate services and establishing agreements about the business service is essential to long-term value chain improvement. The details of the business service level agreement defined in this BSLA specification will enable EERP to determine the varieties of optimization to be supported, and to manage the end-to-end business process.

SOA-EERP Business Rating of Service Version 1.0 contains a the specification for Business Rating for End-to-End Resource Planning (EERP), an XML vocabulary for information exchange on business creditability, reliability and reputation of the service providers. EERP applies service discovery, composition, simulation, and optimization techniques in a novel way to improve business results. It models the business process and the range of potential services, then guide the selection and deployment of services based on the end-to-end business value. The creditability, reliability and reputation of the service need to be understood for estimating the overall business quality of the process that uses those services. The business rating characteristics of the service defined in this Business Rating specification will enable EERP to determine the varieties of optimization to be supported, and to select optimal end-to-end solution..."

See also: the OASIS announcement

Web Development: IEEE Smart Grid Web Portal
Staff, DDJ

"IEEE has launched the IEEE Smart Grid Web Portal, an integrated gateway to Smart Grid intelligence, education, and news from IEEE and other expert sources. The portal is designed for manufacturers, policymakers, educators, academics, governments, engineers, computer scientists, researchers, and other stakeholders in the power and energy, information technology, and communications industries.

The IEEE Smart Grid Web Portal is the first phase of IEEE Smart Grid, created to bring together IEEE's broad array of resources to provide expertise and guidance for those involved in Smart Grid worldwide. The new IEEE Smart Grid initiative will organize, coordinate, leverage and build upon the strength of various entities within and outside of IEEE with Smart Grid expertise and interest... The first IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm) will take place in October 2010 at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and will be centered on all communications aspects that are relevant to the Smart Grid..."

According to the IEEE announcement, "IEEE has more than 100 standards published and in development that are crucial to the Smart Grid, spanning digital information and controls technology, networking, security, reliability, assessment, interconnection of distributed resources including renewable energy sources to the grid, sensors, electric metering, Broadband over Power Line (BPL) and systems engineering... IEEE Smart Grid leverages IEEE's long-term commitment to global modernization and optimization of the power grid to make it more reliable, efficient, secure and environmentally neutral..."

Sieve Notification Using Presence Information
Robins George and Barry Leiba (eds), IETF Internet Draft

IETF has released an initial level -00 Standards Track Internet Draft for Sieve Notification Using Presence Information. This specification defines a further extension to the Sieve mail filtering language Notification extension, defining presence information that may be checked through the 'notify_method_capability' feature. This document was produced by members of the IETF Sieve Mail Filtering Language (SIEVE) Working Group.

Sieve: An Email Filtering Language (RFC 5228) is an IETF Proposed Standard which describes a language for filtering email messages at time of final delivery. It is designed to be implementable on either a mail client or mail server. It is meant to be extensible, simple, and independent of access protocol, mail architecture, and operating system. It is suitable for running on a mail server where users may not be allowed to execute arbitrary programs, such as on black box Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) servers, as the base language has no variables, loops, or ability to shell out to external programs.

The Sieve Notification Using Presence Information I-D notes that it is desirable to tailor Sieve notifications to a user's current situation. Presence information provides some information about the user that would be useful to have access to in these cases. The Notification extension ('Sieve Email Filtering: Extension for Notifications', RFC 5435] defines a mechanism to test for presence (the notify_method_capability feature), and defines one test for presence (the "online" notification-capability). This extension specifies testing of a wider variety of presence information.

When a Sieve event occurs (mail arrives) for a user, a Sieve script running on behalf of that user can present the user's presence URI (in the 'notification-uri' parameter) and test a specific item of notification presence as defined below (in the 'notification-capability' parameter) against one or more values (in the 'key-list' parameter). This document defines the following items of notification presence, which may be specified in the notification-capability parameter: (1) busy: An indication of whether the user is considered 'busy' now; (2) show: The availability status of the user; (3) away: The user is temporarily away; (4) chat: The user is online and actively interested in chatting; (5) dnd: Do Not Disturb; the user should not be disturbed now. (6) offline: The user is offline; (7) xa: The user is away for an extended period - eXtended Away..."

The Kantara Initiative for Online Identity: A One-Year Progress Report
J. Trent Adams and Eve Maler, IETF Journal

"Founded in April 2009, the Kantara Initiative was conceived as an open, global organization with the mission of promoting interoperability and technology harmonization across the myriad identity solutions available and under development. With the proliferation of single-protocol solutions being pursued, the founders of the Kantara Initiative set out to promote the deployment of heterogeneous protocols, standards, and solutions for vendors and end users within the entire network identity ecosystem...

Rather than setting up another standards body, the Kantara Initiative focuses on incubation of ideas and concepts. If specifications emerge from the groups, they are then submitted to other standards-setting organizations for adoption and operational maintenance. Each chartered group that anticipates producing specifications selects the standards body to which it expects to contribute its work when it is fleshed out. For example, some groups are targeting the W3C, others are looking to OASIS, and some have their sights on the IETF.

Since its inception, the Kantara Initiative has fostered a robust environment in which a wide variety of identity ecosystem challenges are being tackled. Among the active work streams are: Promoting component (i.e., protocol-level) interoperability; Ensuring global interoperability within a vertical market but also across markets—e.g., finance to health care; Developing business and policy best practices related to end-user engagement—e.g., contractual intellectual property rights between entities, and privacy issues; Advancing government and regulatory compliance; Helping guide legislation that honours the privacy of end users and protects user-managed access to users' data; Fostering identity assurance programmes to support business and government trust requirements; Promoting recognition of end-user usability needs in developing industry solutions...

Of the 18 Kantara Initiative groups chartered since April 2009, some of the most active are: (1) E-Government: Facilitates collaboration and discussion among Kantara groups with an interest in e-government identity management applications and services. (2) Healthcare Identity Assurance: Designs, implements, and tests reference applications for secure access to health information. (3) Information Sharing: Identifies and documents use cases that illustrate the benefits and challenges of user-driven information sharing. (4) Privacy and Public Policy: Focuses on the interplay between privacy, technology, and policy, and aims to ensure that Kantara contributes to better privacy outcomes for users, data custodians, and other stake-holders. (5) User-Managed Access: Develops specifications that let an individual control the authorization of data sharing and service access made between online services on the individual's behalf, and to facilitate interoperable implementations..."

W3C Publishes XQuery and XPath Full Text Specifications for Review
Sihem Amer-Yahia, Pat Case, Stephen Buxton (et al., eds), W3C TRs

Members of the W3C XML Query Working Group and the XSL Working Group have jointly published an update to the Candidate Recommendation of XQuery and XPath Full Text 1.0, and to the companion XQuery and XPath Full Text 1.0 Use Cases.

"As XML becomes mainstream, users expect to be able to search their XML documents. This requires a standard way to do full-text search, as well as structured searches, against XML documents. A similar requirement for full-text search led ISO to define the SQL/MM-FT standard. SQL/MM-FT defines extensions to SQL to express full-text searches providing functionality similar to that defined in this full-text language extension to XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0. XML documents may contain highly structured data (fixed schemas, known types such as numbers, dates), semi-structured data (flexible schemas and types), markup data (text with embedded tags), and unstructured data (untagged free-flowing text). Where a document contains unstructured or semi-structured data, it is important to be able to search using Information Retrieval techniques such as scoring and weighting.

The "XQuery and XPath Full Text 1.0" CR defines the language and the formal semantics of XQuery and XPath Full Text 1.0, which extends XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 with full-text search capabilities. Additionally, the document defines an XML syntax for XQuery and XPath Full Text 1.0.

"XQuery and XPath Full Text 1.0 Use Cases" specifies usage scenarios for full-text queries as part of XQuery and XPath. Each use case exercises a specific functionality relevant to full-text querying. An XML Schema and sample input data are provided. Each use case specifies a query applied to the input data, a solution in XQuery, a solution in XPath (when possible), and the expected results. The use cases include queries which in most instances can be written with pure Boolean full-text predicates or with scoring, e.g., scoring on the number of occurrences of a word or phrase, scoring on how close words are to one another within a distance query, scoring on how similar a word is to the one being stemmed... They include queries which return only elements and attributes which meet all the conditions specified in the query. In particular, pure Boolean full-text predicate queries return results where the Boolean conditions in the query are satisfied, i.e., are used to select what is being returned to users..."

ASP.NET MVC: Web Development Renewed
Dino Esposito, DDJ

"One alternative to ASP.NET is MonoRail, a variation of the classic Web Forms model based on views (the HTML output) and controllers (methods executed in response to requests). MonoRail's views are produced by an ad hoc engine that uses a source template and input data to produce the HTML.

With MonoRail, you don't focus on pages as you do with Web Forms. Instead, you focus on the actions being taken from the page (methods on a controller class) and its user interface (markup and data placeholders in the view). This leads to separation of concerns (SoC), where the functions of each feature in the program overlap as little as possible, and higher testability... Another ASP.NET alternative is the Model-View-Controller pattern. It's used to create the Web Client Software Factory, a collection of reusable components and libraries for building Web clients that rely on the MVC pattern to generate the UI. WCSF comes with Visual Studio templates, automated tests, and wizards for speeding up development.

ASP.NET MVC 2.0 is a free Web framework that gives you control over your HTML and URLs, facilitates Ajax scripting, and encourages test-driven development. Based on the ASP.NET runtime environment, ASP.NET MVC makes developing Web apps a significantly different experience from using Web Forms. It uses a Web-oriented variation of the MVC pattern, and version 2.0 works with both Visual Studio 2008/.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2010/.NET 4...

ASP.NET MVC is a full alternative to Web Forms. But Web Forms isn't on its way out; it will continue to be improved. Choosing between them is a matter of personal preference and customer requirements. If you like Web Forms, then there's no reason you have to change.When making this choice, do consider the skills, education, and attitude of your development team... It's a completely new framework, designed with SoC and testability in mind. ASP.NET MVC lets you re-experience the way Web development used to be with stateless behavior, full control of HTML, and the freedom to use scripts and cascading style sheets however you want..."

See also: the ASP.NET MVC web site


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