April 2003

• [April 30, 2003] "Using Extensible Markup Language-Remote Procedure Calling (XML-RPC) in Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol (BEEP)." By Ward K. Harold (IBM, Austin, Texas). IETF Network Working Group, RFC. Reference: Request for Comments #3529. Category: Experimental. April 2003. 15 pages. "XML-RPC is an Extensible Markup Language-Remote Procedure Calling protocol that works over the Internet. It defines an XML format for messages that are transfered between clients and servers using HTTP. An XML-RPC message encodes either a procedure to be invoked by the server, along with the parameters to use in the invocation, or the result of an invocation. Procedure parameters and results can be scalars, numbers, strings, dates, etc.; they can also be complex record and list structures. This document specifies a how to use the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol (BEEP) to transfer messages encoded in the XML-RPC format between clients and servers... The BEEP profile for XML-RPC is identified as http://iana.org/beep/transient/xmlrpc in the BEEP 'profile' element during channel creation. In BEEP, when the first channel is successfully created, the 'serverName' attribute in the 'start' element identifies the 'virtual host' associated with the peer acting in the server role... In XML-RPC Message Exchange, a request/response exchange involves sending a request, which results in a response being returned. The BEEP profile for XML-RPC achieves this using a one-to-one exchange, in which the client sends a 'MSG' message containing an request, and the server sends back a 'RPY' message containing an response. The BEEP profile for XML-RPC does not use the 'ERR' message for XML- RPC faults when performing one-to-one exchanges. Whatever response is generated by the server is always returned in the 'RPY' message. This memo defines two URL schemes, xmlrpc.beep and xmlrpc.beeps, which identify the use of XML-RPC over BEEP over TCP. Note that, at present, a 'generic' URL scheme for XML-RPC is not defined... The IANA has registered the profile specified in Section 6.1, and has selected an IANA-specific URI http://iana.org/beep/xmlrpc..." See general references in: (1) "Blocks eXtensible eXchange Protocol Framework (BEEP)"; (2) "XML-RPC." [cache]

• [April 30, 2003] "Towards a Core Ontology for Information Integration." By Martin Doerr (Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology, Heraklion, Greece), Jane Hunter (DSTC Pty, Ltd., Brisbane, Australia), and Carl Lagoze (Computing and Information Science, Cornell University, Ithaca NY). In Journal of Digital Information Volume 4, Issue 1 (April 2003). "In this paper, we argue that a core ontology is one of the key building blocks necessary to enable the scalable assimilation of information from diverse sources. A complete and extensible ontology that expresses the basic concepts that are common across a variety of domains and can provide the basis for specialization into domain-specific concepts and vocabularies, is essential for well-defined mappings between domain-specific knowledge representations (i.e., metadata vocabularies) and the subsequent building of a variety of services such as cross-domain searching, browsing, data mining and knowledge extraction. This paper describes the results of a series of three workshops held in 2001 and 2002 which brought together representatives from the cultural heritage and digital library communities with the goal of harmonizing their knowledge perspectives and producing a core ontology. The knowledge perspectives of these two communities were represented by the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, an ontology for information exchange in the cultural heritage and museum community, and The ABC Ontology and Model, a model for the exchange and integration of digital library information. This paper describes the mediation process between these two different knowledge biases and the results of this mediation - the harmonization of the ABC and CIDOC/CRM ontologies, which we believe may provide a useful basis for information integration in the wider scope of the involved communities... Information integration on the web involves a number of architectural building blocks that are the focus of work of the W3C and the related semantic web community. This work includes mechanisms for information encoding and manipulation (e.g., XML, RDF, XSLT), and ontology construction and reasoning (e.g., RDFS, DAML+OIL, OWL). Information integration also motivates much of the metadata work in the digital library community. Some of this work is focused within specific domains (e.g., FGDC in the geospatial community, IMS LTSC in the educational/instructional community), while other metadata initiatives are looking beyond domain specificity towards providing services across heterogeneous content (e.g.,, Dublin Core and its goal of cross-domain resource discovery). This paper describes work on a core ontology, arguably another of the building blocks to information integration. The goal of a core ontology is to provide a global and extensible model into which data originating from distinct sources can be mapped and integrated. This canonical form can then provide a single knowledge base for cross-domain tools and services (e.g., resource discovery, browsing, and data mining). A single model avoids the inevitable combinatorial explosion and application complexities that results from pairwise mappings between individual metadata formats and/or ontologies..." [cache]

• [April 30, 2003] "Corel Software Gets Smart on XML." By Paul Festa. In CNET News.com (April 30, 2003). "Corel has released a new set of tools for creating enterprise application graphics that meet industry recommendations. The struggling Canadian software company on Monday released Smart Graphics Studio. First announced in December, the software is part of Corel's push to boost earnings with tools for use with XML, or Extensible Markup Language, a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation for creating industry- or task-specific markup languages and writing documents more easily read by machines. The studio is development software for creating graphics written in the W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an XML-based graphics creation standard... Corel says, and at least one analyst agreed, that the Smart Graphics Studio represents a first for the market... By 'intelligent,' Corel means the ability to associate a single image with changing data such as a thermometer graphic whose temperature and mercury rises and falls according to information gleaned from a database. Corel is touting its new studio as a way for developers of intranets, extranets and Web sites to automate the creation of data-driven graphics that can communicate easily with a number of XML-based specifications. XML is the basis of not only SVG but a number of Web standards associated with the emerging infrastructure called Web services through which enterprise applications can share information automatically. 'The XML aspect of this is what's going to be compelling for people using Web services,' said Kirzner. 'It lends itself to a lot of the emerging Web services standards, so it will be interoperable with Web services tools.' Corel's studio handles not only SVG but also another W3C standard called Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). That specification translates the data taken from a database into something that the SVG graphic -- and the JavaScript applet that displays it -- can understand. Corel said that Ford Motor was a pilot customer for the studio and that consulting firm Wipro Technologies had signed on to use the final product..." See additional details in the news story "Corel Smart Graphics Studio Uses SVG for Graphical Applications Development."

• [April 30, 2003] "Clean Up Your Schema for SOAP. Updating XML Schemas to be SOAP-Friendly." By Shane Curcuru (Advisory Software Engineer, IBM Research). From IBM developerWorks, Web services. April 29, 2003, ['More and more projects are using XML schemas to define the structure of their data. As your repository of schemas grows, you need tools to manipulate and manage your schemas. The Eclipse XSD Schema Infoset Model has powerful querying and editing capabilities. In this article, Shane Curcuru will show how you can update a schema for use with SOAP by automatically converting attribute uses into element declarations.'] "If you've built a library of schemas, you might want to reuse them for new applications. If you already have a data model for an internal purchase order, as you move towards Web services you may need to update it for use with SOAP. SOAP allows you to transport an xml message across a network; the xml body can also be constrained with a schema. However a SOAP message typically uses element data for its xml body, not attribute data. You'll explore a program that can automatically update an existing schema document to convert any attribute declaration into roughly 'equivalent' element declarations... Given the complexity of XML schemas, you certainly don't want to use Notepad to edit the .xsd files. A good XML editor is not much of a step up -- while it may organize your elements and attributes nicely, it can't show the many abstract Infoset relationships that are defined in the Schema specification. That's where the Schema Infoset Model comes in; it expresses both the concrete DOM representation of a set of schema documents, and the full abstract Infoset model of a schema. Both of these representations are shown through the programmatic API of the Model as well as in the Model's built-in sample editor for schemas... If you've installed the XSD Schema Infoset Model and Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) plugins into Eclipse, you can see the sample editor at work in your Workbench... performing a conceptually simple editing operation on schema documents (turning attributes into elements) can entail a fair amount of work. However the power of the Schema Infoset Model's representation of both the abstract Infoset of a schema and its concrete representation of the schema documents makes this a manageable task. The Model also includes simple tools for loading and saving schema documents to a variety of sources, making it a complete solution for managing your schema repository programmatically. Some users might ask, 'Why not use XSLT or another XML-aware application to edit schema documents?' While XSLT can easily process the concrete model of a set of schema documents, it can't easily see any of the abstract relationships within the overall schema that they represent. For example, suppose that you need to update any enumerated simpleTypes to include a new UNK enumeration value meaning unknown. Of course, you only want to update enumerations that fit this format of using strings of length of three; you would not want to update numeric or other enumerations... This article presupposes an understanding of schemas in XML and how SOAP works. The sample code included in the zip file works standalone or in an Eclipse workbench..." General references in "XML Schemas."

• [April 30, 2003] "Sun Faces Challenges With Java." By Yvonne L. Lee. In Software Development Times (May 01, 2003). "A month before JavaOne, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s annual developer conference, the talk has moved away from the familiar 'How will Java compete against Microsoft's .NET Framework?' to whether Sun continues to be the appropriate standard-bearer for the language and Web services framework, and whether JavaOne continues to represent the interests of the entire Java community. JavaOne 'was all about Java. Now it's more like a Sun user group,' said Scott Hebner, IBM Corp.'s director of marketing for the WebSphere application server. 'I think the Sun presence has become Sun specific more than Java specific.' The issue arises because IBM and BEA Systems Inc., and not Sun, lead the market for Java middleware and application servers, according to both analysts and partners. 'I think the lead is going to be a two-horse race for at least a couple of years,' said Rob Hailstone, International Data Corp.'s European software infrastructure research director. 'My bets this year are a little different from last year,' said Sam Patterson, CEO of ComponentSource, an Atlanta-based distributor of software components for .NET and Java. 'Last year, I would have said IBM. This year, it's BEA.' The reason these market analysts and partners -- as well as financial analysts -- view BEA so strongly is that the San Jose company understands the importance of integration, they say... The problem for Sun, according to Bear Stearns analyst Naveen Bobba, is that it is trying to be both a systems company and a software company without having the resources of, say, an IBM. In this regard, he said, it is competing against not just IBM and BEA, but also Intel and Microsoft. 'The issue for Sun really is, can Sun invest and compete with multiple companies?' said Bobba. Still, having the plethora of competitors may not really be a bad thing. In fact, it may prove that Java is the multivendor platform that Sun has been touting, Hailstone said..."

• [April 30, 2003] "Sun Readies Revamped Java/XML Integration Server." By Elizabeth Montalbano. In InternetWeek (April 30, 2003). "In a project code-named Ganymede, Sun is working to combine facets of its current integration software products to build a pure J2EE integration server, solution providers said. The new software is part of Sun's Project Orion strategy to 'bake' all of its Java middleware into its Solaris operating system... Sources said the new product will combine elements of Sun's Sun ONE Integration Server, B2B Edition, the former C-based iPlanet ECXpert product; and Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition, formerly the Java-based Forte Fusion product. Sun also will cull pieces of functionality from the former iPlanet Process Manager product and include them in the new server. The new integration server will be J2EE-based and 'loaded on the application server so you can have, as Sun does with Forte Fusion, JMS and XML, with XML over HTTP on the back end,' Guinn said. The new product also will include B2B components of ECXpert, and support the Java Connector Architecture (JCA), a Java standard for integrating legacy systems to Java applications, he added. In order for Project Orion to succeed, Sun must offer integration software that works seamlessly with the rest of its middleware and can be updated in conjunction with other Sun ONE software products, Guinn said. 'This is the continued evolution of the vision from Jonathan Schwartz to get everything on the same release schedule,' he said. 'You're not going to have multiple products that don't support the same technology.' Solution providers said a competitive integration server is the missing link in Sun's Java middleware stack, as the company does not have Java-based software to provide both EAI and B2B integration that is closely linked to the rest of its middleware. Solution providers said Sun's plans are in part a response to BEA Systems' move to combine Java application development with application integration in its WebLogic Platform 8.1, due out in its entirety by August. Specifically, BEA's WebLogic Integration, the EAI and B2B software component of the platform, is the product Sun's new integration server will compete directly with..."

• [April 30, 2003] "Microsoft to Expose Passport as XML-enabled .NET Web Service This Summer. Officials Give Update on .NET." By Paula Rooney. In CRN (April 30, 2003). "As part of its growing portfolio of .NET services, Microsoft will expose its Passport authentication service as an XML Web service this summer, officials said. The forthcoming Microsoft Passport Web Service, which will support XML and the delivery of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages over HTTP, joins existing Microsoft Web services such as .NET Alerts and MapPoint Web Service. The Passport Web Service will also support WS-Security, a specification designed to secure data stored by in the online authentication service. Microsoft, IBM and VeriSign submitted the latest version of the Web Services Security (WS-Security) specification to the Organization for the Advancement (OASIS) last June. 'We're exposing the Passport service as a Web service,' said Steven VanRoekel, director of Web service marketing at Microsoft,' in an interview with CRN here on Wednesday. 'It'll add WS-Security so there's encryption and digital signatures, and it'll have a WSDL file.' Microsoft currently operates a Passport service on the Internet and has a Passport Software Development Kit (SDK) for developers. However, the availability of XML/SOAP and WS-Security capabilities of the forthcoming Passport Web Service due this summer will make it possible for developers to bind authentication within their own XML Web services. Solution providers say support for WS-Security will help developers of business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) applications get over their fears. Microsoft said the Passport Web Service is just the tip of the iceberg as the company begins integrating more advanced Web service specifications such as WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging and WS-Transactions into its infrastructure products and services over the next 12 to 18 months. At Professional Developers Conference in October, Microsoft is expected to debut a new software development kit for .NET MyServices and other business related Web services based on XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, and WS-I standards, officials noted... Microsoft's latest toolset, for example, supports WS-Security, which will enable developers to harness the forthcoming Passport Web Service into their applications. The Windows Server integrates the latest .NET Framework as well as support for UDDI, which will enable companies to build catalogs of web services, Charney added. In the forthcoming months, Microsoft will continue embedding Web service 'plumbing' into its server applications such as BizTalk and future client applications including the 'Longhorn' Windows XP upgrade to make it a better 'consumer' of XML Web services, officials said... Neil Charney also said that the delivery of important .NET infrastructure products such as Visual Studio.NET and Windows Server 2003 last week and the completion of the Web service functionality for the WS-I specifications are significant milestones that will spur additional development in 2003..."

• [April 30, 2003] "Corel Preps Vector Graphics for Business Use." By Rich Seeley. In Application Development Trends (April 30, 2003). "Corel Corp., Ottawa, Canada, today announced the availability of its new Smart Graphics Studio, SVG technology for creating and publishing open-standards graphics. The tools make it possible to take business data and existing graphics such as CAD files and convert them into useful applications, said Ian LeGrow, vice president of new ventures at Corel. Far from playing simply an illustrative role, explained LeGrow, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) technology can be deployed in applications to improve productivity. In a presentation with Rob Williamson, product manager for Corel Smart Graphics Studio, the point was illustrated with an example of a power plant using SVG rendering. When a problem arose with cabling in the demo plant, engineers and technicians followed cumbersome processes to identify and locate a specific cable. A query to a database produced identification numbers for the cable, which then had to be searched for manually on a CAD drawing of the cable layout. A new application using Corel Smart Graphics Studio integrates the ID numbers from the database and the CAD drawings onto a single PC screen with the cable in question highlighted so that it can be immediately identified. This represents a productivity gain for the plant workers and could be crucial in an emergency where every second may count, LeGrow and Williamson pointed out. They said this illustrates the firm's motto: 'Smart Graphics are good for business'..." See details in the news story "Corel Smart Graphics Studio Uses SVG for Graphical Applications Development."

• [April 30, 2003] "SCO Directs Attention to New Software." By Stephen Shankland. In CNET News.com (April 29, 2003). "SCO Group's fastest-growing revenue source stems from its efforts to enforce proper licensing of its software, but the company announced Web services software Wednesday that could steer some attention back to the company's products as well. The company announced its SCOx framework Tuesday, a plan to build support for Web services standards into its Unix and Linux software. Web services technology -- pioneered largely by companies including Microsoft and IBM -- include a set of standards that govern how different computers can conduct sophisticated business transactions across the Internet... SCO has begun distributing portions of the Web services work. The company plans to show off some applications at its SCO Forum conference in Las Vegas on August 17. SCO will support basic Web services such as UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). The SCOx framework will be able to run software developed for other Web services infrastructure, including Microsoft's .Net and Sun Microsystems' Java 2 Enterprise Edition, SCO said..." See reference following and the announcement: "SCO Outlines SCOx Web Services Strategy for Future Growth. Company to Roll Out Technology Framework for Integrated Web Services Applications at SCO Forum.".

• [April 30, 2003] "SCOx Overview: Understanding and Getting Started with SCOx." By Erik W. Hughes, Simmi K. Bhargava, and Thor Christianson. SCO Overview White Paper. April 29, 2003. "SCOx is a technology framework used to deliver business applications and online services to key markets. Through this framework, SCOx lets solution providers plug their existing and new applications into a web services environment; provide billable, metered services; and leverage a fleet of resellers for selling the SCOx-enabled applications. Because customers have varied environments and policies, SCOx-enabled applications may be hosted securely from a remote location or installed on the customer's network... SCOx is a strategy and a framework, not a product. The SCOx strategy is how SCO will leverage web services and SCO's ebusiness services to offer new revenue opportunities to SCO resellers and ISV partners. The SCOx framework allows SCO partners to participate in the SCOx strategy, by offering the components partners need to create web services enabled applications and deliver these applications and associated benefits to their customers. SCO's customers will not buy SCOx. They will buy SCO operating systems, applications, online services, and third party products and services from SCO resellers and application vendors that are integrated into the SCOx framework. The SCOx framework is strictly standards based (XML, SOAP). This allows web services enabled applications developed on other platforms (.NET and J2EE) and running on non-SCO operating systems to integrate with the SCOx framework. The result is maximum flexibility for developers and resellers allowing them to provide solutions to heterogeneous environments. In summary the differentiators of SCOx are: (1) SCOx is an open development model. Developers can use their choice of tools; (2) SCOx enables integration of .NET applications as well as Java applications; (3) SCOx offers the power and stability of PC Unix as a deployment choice for SCOx applications; (4) SCOx makes available -- through a single dashboard -- a powerful suite of web-based applications which can be integrated with any web services enabled application to offer an enhanced solution to customers; (5) SCOx incorporates an extensive channel of resellers and software developers..."

• [April 30, 2003] "Stenbit Details Defense's Plans for a Metadata Registry." By Dawn S. Onley. In Government Computer News (April 30, 2003). "The [US] Defense Department can't achieve net-centricity without a policy for managing the millions of lines of code in use throughout the department, CIO John Stenbit says. As DOD does more business over the Internet, applying metadata tags is a critical first step in controlling data while ensuring ease of access, Stenbit said at the Software Technology Conference. The use of metadata will promote interoperability and software reuse in the secure, networked environment planned for DOD's Global Information Grid. 'The effective management of metadata is essential to implementing the department's net-centric vision,' Stenbit said. To begin this effort, Stenbit early this month sent a memo to service secretaries and Defense agency chiefs outlining a phased approach for creating a DOD Metadata Registry as required in Defense Management Initiative Decision 905. To satisfy the requirements, Defense agencies must report by May 30 [2003] to the Defense Information Systems Agency about the types and quantity of Extensible Markup Language metadata they plan to include in the registry. Then, by July 30 [2003], agencies must notify DISA of any metadata holdings not written in XML. Agencies have until September 30, 2003 to register all supported XML information resources, such as schema documents..." See: (1) DoD Metadata Registry and Clearinghouse; (2) DoD XML Registry. General references in "DII Common Operating Environment (COE) XML Registry."

• [April 30, 2003] "Web Services Finds Royalty-Free OASIS." By Martin LaMonica. In ZDNet News (April 30, 2003). "A standards body has formed a committee -- which includes Microsoft, IBM, BEA and SAP -- to help standardise specifications for automating complex business processes A group within the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) will meet next month to discuss the technical development of Business Process Execution Language for Web services (BPEL), a proposal led by several companies, including IBM, Microsoft, BEA and SAP... Products that adhere to the BPEL specification should make it easier for businesses to create Web services applications that automate multistep business processes such as handling an insurance claim. Web services is a term to describe a set of standards and programming methods for building applications that can easily share data across disparate systems. The build-up to the technical committee's first meeting at Oasis next month has been marked by some controversy. By seeking to standardise the Web services business specification through Oasis, backers of BPEL bypassed a similar effort by standards body the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C choreography working group was formed at the beginning of this year with the goal of sorting through several overlapping proposals for automating business processes using Web services. Oracle, Sun Microsystems, BEA and SAP are members of the W3C's choreography working group, but BEA and SAP have decided to throw their weight behind BPEL. IBM and Microsoft were invited to participate in the W3C's standardisation process, but declined. Microsoft attended the first meeting of the W3C's choreography working group, but left after one day... Steven VanRoekel, Microsoft's director of Web services marketing, reiterated that the BPEL authors do not plan to charge royalties on any products based on BPEL. He indicated that royalties could slow implementation of business process automation products using Web services..."

• [April 30, 2003] "OASIS Takes On Workflow Specification. Committee to Craft Standard Based on Spec from IBM, Microsoft, BEA." By John Fontana. In InfoWorld (April 30, 2003). "The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards on Tuesday agreed to form a committee to investigate crafting a Web services standard for process workflow... OASIS formed the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL) technical committee to take over work on the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) specification. That specification is a workflow language that describes the Web services that need to be executed as part of a business process, the order in which they are executed, and the type of data they share. The new OASIS committee heats up the competition to create a business process workflow standard. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is working on the Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI), which is supported by Sun and a host of others including BPMI.org, Commerce One, Fujitsu, Intalio, IONA, Oracle, SAP, and SeeBeyond. IBM, Microsoft, and its partners will submit royalty-free Version 1.1 of BPEL4WS to OASIS on May 16,, 2003 during the committee's first formal meeting. The committee says it plans to establish a relationship with the W3C. The relationship may take some smoothing over since not more than a month ago Microsoft joined the WSCI group just in time for its first meeting and then abruptly resigned. Now, Microsoft and its partners have firmly established their intention to drive a specification within another standards body..."

• [April 29, 2003] "Portal Syndication: Embedding One Web Site's Functionality in Another." By Ivelin Ivanov. From WebServices.xml.com (April 29, 2003). ['Ivelin Ivanov on embedding remote web site functionality with Apache Cocoon.'] "Web site syndication has gotten more popular as sites reference each other not only by a single hyperlink but also by embedding content. The idea was pioneered by Netscape's Rich Site Summary (RSS) XML format. RSS was developed in early 1999 to populate Netscape's My Netscape portal with external newsfeeds ('channels'). Since then RSS has taken on a life of its own and now thousands of sites use it as a 'what's new' mechanism. RSS is an example of an organically grown and widely accepted standard. It was not endorsed by any of the popular standards committees. Even so it quickly became popular and found a large number of creative uses. Lately, however, it has reached its limits. There is a demand for more advanced portal syndication which RSS cannot satisfy. The latest generation web portals demand more than posting news stories. Embedding and personalizing rich content and behavior from remote portals is becoming a necessity. Limited success has been achieved through complex and sophisticated backend integration via proprietary or web services compliant protocols. Recognizing the growing demand, influential organizations have attempted to develop new languages like the Web Services Expression Language (WSXL) from IBM, Web Services Inspection Language (WSIL) from Microsoft, and Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) from the OASIS Group. While these efforts are certainly worthwhile and promising, it will most likely take years before they pass the filters of real life trial and failure. All of them require a thick infrastructure layer to support implementations. While possible, it is again unlikely that mainstream deployment will be achieved instantly. Fortunately there is way to satisfy a large portion of the syndication requirements by applying established technologies and tools. We will illustrate the architecture of a possible solution using Apache Cocoon... The Web Service Proxy component is tightly integrated with the Cocoon framework and is particularly convenient to use in combination with XMLForm to enable syndication of web site functionality..." Related: (1) "RDF Site Summary (RSS)"; (2) "Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP)"; (3) "Web Services Experience Language (WSXL)"; (4) "Web Services Inspection Language (WSIL)."

• [April 29, 2003] "XML Transactions for Web Services, Part 2." By Faheem Khan. From WebServices.xml.com (April 29, 2003). ['The use of atomic transactions in web services applications. Part 2.'] "In the first part of this series, I introduced federated web service applications and transactional web services, including brief descriptions of of the WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction specifications. In this article I discuss and demonstrate the operation of atomic transactions in web services... The WS-Transaction specification defines a set of protocols to support atomic transactions. The term 'atomic transactions' is not specific to web services, of course. It is a concept well known in database applications. In fact, 'database transactions' is effectively a synonym for 'atomic transactions'. WS-Transaction defines the concept of an Atomic Transaction (AT) based on the proven concept of atomic database transactions. The WS-Transaction specification defines an AT as having the following characteristics: It results either in the commitment of all activities or none of them. Activities involved in an AT are treated as an indivisible whole. The entire set of activities -- the atomic whole -- either succeeds or fails. The success of the atomic whole is normally referred to as a 'Commit' operation, while the failure of any single activity results in a 'Rollback' of the set of activities which constitutes the AT. We have seen that a database transaction considers the results of a transaction to be temporary until they are either committed or rolled back. A logical implication of this temporary storage of results is that the transaction are isolated from the rest of the system. If transactions are not isolated, other database operations and transactions may alter the database during the execution of one transaction, thus producing inconsistent or inaccurate results. Isolation in database transactions is a technical issue. But it implies two important side effects. When we try to keep a transaction isolated, we have to temporarily lock some of the database resources, which means these resources will not be available to other applications during the execution of the transaction. This leads to two side effects: A transaction should take a little time as possible, freeing locked database resources as soon as possible. Thus, database transactions are short lived. Only trusted users and applications should be allowed to access the transactional features of a database; being able to lock resources indefinitely is a denial of service attack which may be launched by malicious users... In the next part of this series, we will see what happens if things go wrong. Does AT rollback mean that we lose this business opportunity? There should be ways to compensate for rolled back transactions. For example, we might want to buy components from vendors if they are not available in stock. These questions lead us to Business Activities (BA), which I will examine in the next article, particularly how a BA crosses the boundaries of trusted domains..."

• [April 29, 2003] "Open Source and Open Standards." By Peter Saint-André. In O'Reilly ONLamp.com (April 29, 2003). ['On the intersection of protocol, source, and community.'] "How critical are open standards to the viability of the open source community? And which is a stronger guarantee of openness in the technology ecosystem: open standards or open code? ... What is a standard? Some people think that when the IETF or W3C approves a protocol or format, it thereby becomes a standard. But standardization is not a matter of approval; rather, it is a matter of acceptance in the market. And what is the market? It's a complex stew of projects and organizations who develop and use the emerging standard. In fact, it looks a lot like the ecosystem of developers and users, but written on a global scale. Not all standards are open (for example, MS Word and PowerPoint). However, when formats and protocols are open, then open implementations that are technically strong usually (but not always) tend to be accepted by the marketplace as standards. Indeed, often a particular implementation of a certain protocol becomes not only a standard but the dominant market-maker. For example, Apache is the dominant web server and a protocol like HTTPng failed to catch on in large part because it lacked support in the Apache community... In the Jabber community, we have pursued something of a hybrid approach. First we simultaneously created the core protocol and open source implementations, then we grew the developer community and user base (as well as the number and range of companies involved in development and deployment). Once that foundation was strong, we finally sought standardization of the core protocol through the IETF's XMPP Working Group, while maintaining a more nimble Jabber-specific community standards process managed by the open Jabber Software Foundation. Only time will tell if Jabber/XMPP becomes a standard for real-time messaging and presence. But the Jabber community is definitely focused on strengthening all three legs of the stool: protocol, source, and community. And given everything that's happening with Jabber and XMPP these days, we may well be witnessing the emergence of an Internet standard..." General references in "Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)."

• [April 29, 2003] "Mozilla Plan Sticks to Basics." By Jim Rapoza. In eWEEK (April 28, 2003). "During the last few years, the Mozilla Organization created the blueprint for taking a commercial product and making it open source, converting the old Netscape browser -- which had been vanquished by Microsoft Corp. and Internet Explorer -- into the open-source Mozilla, arguably the best browser on the market today. With this mission accomplished, The Mozilla Organization earlier this month began planning the next phase of Mozilla development. In many ways, it's a big departure from the past. The Mozilla development road map points to a new direction for Mozilla -- one that is more modular and has tighter controls over development... Probably the biggest change for most users will be the move away from the all-encompassing browser suite to individual components that can be easily integrated if a user so chooses. In eWEEK Labs' opinion, this is an excellent move because the massive browser suite that started with the old Netscape Communicator never made much sense to us and was emblematic of the browser wars bloat... Rather than Mozilla, the focus of browser development will now be the stand-alone Firebird (formerly Phoenix) browser. Like Mozilla, Firebird is a cross-platform browser, but it is much leaner and quicker because it is basically just a browser. The name of this component could change in the very near future because Firebird is already the name of an open-source database... Firebird does have an add-on model that makes it simple to bring in additional features and capabilities. Under Firebird, development of the browser will also change: Firebird features a new iteration of the XUL (XML User Interface Language) tool kit. Also getting the stand-alone treatment is the Mozilla mail client, which will now be known as Thunderbird (formerly Minotaur). This client will also have an XUL interface and will work across platforms, but it will also be more attractive to businesses and users that want a good open-source mail client but don't want to add an entire browser suite to get one. Other Mozilla components, such as Chatzilla and Composer, are currently up in the air -- it is not clear if they will become stand-alone applications or add-ons to Firebird and Thunderbird..."

• [April 29, 2003] "Bleepin' BPELs." By John Taschek. In eWEEK (April 28, 2003). "Is it possible that something once pronounced Bipple and now Be-PEL is shaking up the Web services world? Is something as dry as Business Process Execution Language signaling an important split in Web services standards groups? Are Microsoft, IBM and BEA icing Oracle and Sun and their customers? The answer to each is yes. The decision of IBM, BEA and Microsoft (has anyone realized that the names of the big-three Web services players create an acronym for IBM?) to put a tiny specification for how Web services orchestration should occur into OASIS rather than the W3C sealed the developing split between the two groups. The result of the split is not antagonism, however. OASIS and the W3C are no longer competitors for standards; they're now perfectly complementary... At one time, standards became standards because: (a) they were de facto and in place because a behemoth vendor had tremendous presence in the market with a product -- think Microsoft Word; or (b) the standards bodies agreed through debate and comment to make an underlying communication foundation a reality through a specification -- think the W3C. We're now entering a phase in which standards become standards before the vendors have products and before the specification is fully debated and realized. It's standardization by market dominance, and IBM and Microsoft, with BEA as a tag-along, have mastered how this should happen. The vendors involved could not care less about customers. They're seeing things long before customers see them -- as if they were visionaries when they're actually just big-time capitalists. The problem is that Web services orchestration is years ahead of what most companies want or need to do now. But these vendors are going at it, spiting customers because they can. By the time customers are set to implement, the vendors will be aligned, and customers will have to go with one of the big-three vendors..." See: (1) the news story of April 16, 2003 "OASIS Forms Web Services Business Process Execution Language TC (WSBPEL)"; (2) general references in "Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS).". The document "Business Process Management and Choreography" references related standards activity.

• [April 29, 2003] "Bluestream Upgrades XML Database." By Lisa Vaas. In eWEEK (April 29, 2003). "Bluestream Database Software Corp. has released an upgrade to its native XML database that features smoother handling of collaborative content management with XML and binary data. XStreamDB 3.0 has a new resource manager that enables content management via integration with Web or print authoring and publishing software. It now supports Corel XMetaL for XML content authoring using that software's word processor-like view of content. The new version also improves support for Altova XMLSpy for editing data-centric XML documents... Other new features include faster full-text search and indexing, built-in WebDAV server, event triggers, automated backup and the new XStreamDB 3.0 Server Console application for easier server administration. XStreamDB 3.0 also now supports binary document types with MIME-type attributes in addition to native XML document support. It has also acquired derivation by extension and attribute groups, adding to its existing W3C schemas support. The database now has full-text search that features LIKE wildcard matching, found word marking, phrase search and proximity search. XStream 3.0 is a cross-platform database server that runs on Windows NT/2000/XP, Solaris, Mac OS X or Linux. It features a choice of Java API, WebDAV or the XStreamDB 3.0 Explorer application for access to documents and data. The database also supports XQuery with update extensions, full text search, shared resource management and XML schemas with automatic validation. XStreamDB is compliant with the ACID (Atomicity Consistency Isolation Durability) standard for open-source database systems. That standard indicates that the database supports "all or nothing" transactions -- those that either work to their conclusion or refrain from changing data. XStreamDB is a pure Java technology-based server and requires Java 1.3 or 1.4 Runtime Environment..." See the announcement "Bluestream Releases XStreamDB 3.0 Native XML Database. Major Upgrade Adds Features for Collaborative Content Management." General references in "XML and Databases."

• [April 28, 2003] "OASIS Pushes Global E-Procurement Standardization." By Mark Leon. In InternetNews.com (April 28, 2003). "The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium has created a forum for government agencies, organizations, and private companies to work together on global e-procurement standards. The new Electronic Procurement Standardization (EPS) Technical Committee will analyze requirements, identify gaps, and make recommendations for improving the interoperability of XML, internet based e-procurement systems. Other EPS participants include the Institute for Supply Management, Information Society Standardization System of the European Standards Committee (CEN/ISSS), US National Institute for Governmental Purchasing (NIGP), US National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO), RosettaNet, and Seebeyond. Terri Tracey of the Institute for Supply Management will chair the new committee. 'We are already hearing from other organizations that are interested in joining,' she said. Patrick Gannon, Oasis president and CEO, said input from government and industry is essential to ensure that new e-procurement specifications are neutral and effective. John Ketchell, CEN/ISSS director, said his organization joined the EPS to foster consensus between emerging global standards and regional European requirements. He also said CEN/ISSS plans to start an e-procurement project to complement European legislative initiatives designed to harmonize public e-procurement across EU member states. Rob Rosenthal, senior analyst with IDC in Framingham, Mass., saw the announcement as a positive development, but said no one should expect a universal standard for e-procurement any time soon. 'Procurement has always been a big part of e-commerce,' said Rosenthal, 'but it goes back at least twenty five years with EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) and there are as many EDI standards as there are companies with connections'..." See: (1) the news story of 2003-04-04: "OASIS Forms Electronic Procurement Standardization Technical Committee"; (2) general references in "Electronic Procurement Standardization."

• [April 28 2003] "OASIS: Net Procurement Needs to Align." By Paul Festa. In CNET News.com (April 28, 2003). "A Web services standards group has launched an effort to push for uniform practices in the way supplies are bought and sold online. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) formed a committee devoted to what it called 'e-procurement' systems, saying existing technology needed standardization... 'Our first priority will be to develop a comprehensive framework for electronic procurement standards, relating existing specifications to those in development,' Terri Tracey, chair of the OASIS Electronic Procurement Standardization (EPS) Technical Committee, said in a statement. 'It is vital that we reach consensus on how these standards fit together. Once we establish our framework and priorities, we will create technical committees within OASIS to advance the necessary standards and implementation processes.' Members of the new committee include the (Institute for Supply Management), the Information Society Standardization System of the European Standards Committee (CEN/ISSS), National Institute for Governmental Purchasing (NIGP), National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO), RosettaNet and SeeBeyond Technologies..." See: (1) the news story of 2003-04-04: "OASIS Forms Electronic Procurement Standardization Technical Committee"; (2) general references in "Electronic Procurement Standardization."

• [April 26, 2003] "Introducing WS-Coordination." A Big Step Toward a New Standard." By Jim Webber and Mark Little (Arjuna Technologies Limited). In WebServices Journal Volume 3, Issue 5 (May 24, 2003). With 5 figures. ['In July 2002, BEA, IBM, and Microsoft released a trio of specifications designed to support business transactions over Web services. These specifications - BPEL4WS, WS-Transaction, and WS-Coordination - together form the bedrock for reliably choreographing Web services-based applications, providing business process management, transactional integrity, and generic coordination facilities respectively.'] "This article introduces the underlying concepts of Web Services Coordination, and shows how a generic coordination framework can be used to provide the foundations for higher-level business processes. In future articles, we will demonstrate how coordination allows us to move up the Web services stack to encompass WS-Transaction and on to BPEL4WS... The fundamental idea underpinning WS-Coordination is that there is indeed a generic need for propagating context information in a Web services environment, which is a shared requirement irrespective of the applications being executed. The WS-Coordination specification defines a framework that allows different coordination protocols to be plugged in to coordinate work between clients, services, and participants. The WS-Coordination specification talks in terms of activities, which are distributed units of work involving one or more parties (which may be services, components, or even objects). At this level, an activity is minimally specified and is simply created, made to run, and then completed... Ahatever coordination protocol is used, and in whatever domain it is deployed, the same generic requirements are present: (1) Instantiation (or activation) of a new coordinator for the specific coordination protocol for a particular application instance; (2) Registration of participants with the coordinator such that they will receive that coordinator's protocol messages during (some part of) the application's lifetime; (3) Propagation of contextual information between the Web services that comprise the application; (4) An entity to drive the coordination protocol through to completion... The context is critical to coordination since it contains the information necessary for services to participate in the protocol. It provides the glue to bind all of the application's constituent Web services together into a single coordinated application whole. Since WS-Coordination is a generic coordination framework, contexts have to be tailored to meet the needs of specific coordination protocols that are plugged into the framework... WS-Coordination looks set to become the adopted standard for activity coordination on the Web. Out of the box, WS-Coordination provides only activity and registration services, and is extended through protocol plug-ins that provide domain-specific coordination facilities. In addition to its generic nature, the WS-Coordination model also scales efficiently via interposed coordination, which allows arbitrary collections of Web services to coordinate their operation in a straightforward and scalable manner. Though WS-Coordination is generically useful, at the time of this writing only one protocol that leverages WS-Coordination has been made public: WS-Transaction We'll look at this protocol in our next article." [alt URL]

• [April 26, 2003] "Business Processes: Turning Integration Upside Down." By Jim Mackay (Business Technology Group, webMethods). In WebServices Journal Volume 3, Issue 5 (May 24, 2003). "In the IT world, integration became an issue as soon as the second computer with the second application came online... Perhaps the largest group to latch onto business process integration is enterprise system vendors. The first was J.D. Edwards, with its XBP/XPI approach. SAP developed its version, known as xApps, on top of its NetWeaver platform.. PeopleSoft has AppConnect, and the most recent, and probably most publicized, is Siebel's UAN initiative. Each vendor approaches the solution in a slightly different way. SAP and PeopleSoft, for the most part, have built all of the underlying technology themselves as an extension of the latest generation of their core infrastructure and middleware. At this point, they both still outsource adapter support. JD Edwards, on the other hand, embeds webMethods technology as their XPI infrastructure, then builds their XBPs, or Cross Business Processes, using webMethods middleware. Siebel has decided that, to achieve true openness and interoperability they need to define platform-neutral business processes using standards, and then work with multiple vendors, including, webMethods and Tibco, to create packaged solutions to deploy these processes on their respective platforms. Whether employing business processes through the offerings of integration vendors, system integrators, or enterprise software vendors, a key set of requirements must exist in order to be successful: First, a compelling business problem that will return the investment in a short time. Generally, these are business problems endemic to specific industries, so implemented solutions are as close to "packaged" as possible. Next, the composite applications that make up the detailed functionality supporting these business processes have to be available, and exposed as services through standards. Finally, a service-oriented integration infrastructure for the design, development, extension, deployment, maintenance and management of the processes must be in place. This integration infrastructure needs to leverage the decoupling that was discussed earlier. It needs to encourage and leverage the separation of the process flow from the human interaction from the data documents and their associated representation and translation. It also must be able to instantiate business processes that were defined without the end implementation and deployment in mind. And last, it must facilitate the management of multiple business processes executing simultaneously across a distributed environment..." [alt URL]

• [April 26, 2003] "Exposing Legacy Applications. An Apache SOAP Framework That Provides an Excellent Implementation." By Adelene Ng (Xerox Corporation, Rochester, NY). In WebServices Journal Volume 3, Issue 5 (May 24, 2003). With 10 figures. "In this article, I propose a solution using SOAP that allows legacy client methods to be called from a SOAP client. A SOAP client is just like any program that can be run from the user's computer. Even though other solutions are possible, for example using XML-RPC, SOAP offers the following advantages: Support for a richer set of data types; Allowing users to specify a particular encoding; Namespace aware; Asynchronous; Support for request routing and preprocessing of requests via SOAP headers... I use a three-tier architecture in this implementation... The first tier is the SOAP client, which accesses the legacy application through SOAP. The legacy application resides in another client/server application. The legacy client resides on the Web server -- the middle tier. A wrapper layer is provided around the legacy client application. This allows for the clean separation of legacy calls from the wrapper class, and it isolates the legacy code to a single location, which makes for easy maintenance. The SOAP client accesses the legacy client application on the Web server through the wrapper class. The legacy client, in turn, communicates with the legacy server through ONC-RPC. The legacy server may reside on a different machine and is the third tier in our architecture. This article shows how legacy applications can be exposed as a Web service and accessed through the SOAP client. I also discuss the possibilities of 'chaining' on both the Web server and legacy application tiers. The Apache SOAP implementation provides an excellent framework in which to develop SOAP applications. The underlying mechanism (Call object) makes all the SOAP communications appear to work seamlessly together. The user does not need to be exposed to the nitty-gritty details of SOAP in order make a SOAP call..." [alt URL]

• [April 26, 2003] "Don't Segment Desktop XML. InfoPath Needs to be Everywhere." By Jon Udell. In InfoWorld (April 25, 2003). "My vocal support for the next version of Microsoft Office has drawn heat in various quarters. Naysayers are convinced that Microsoft will find some way to cripple the XML capabilities of Word, Excel, and InfoPath. I've said they're wrong. These products do XML by the book. Even more importantly, they embody a vision that's eluded the Web services plumbers: people are SOAP endpoints too. Business processes do not exist in some separate universe in which XML packets flow untouched by human hands. We're not just input sources and output sinks. We have to be monitors and exception-handlers too. And when our ubiquitous personal productivity tools enable us to see and touch XML data, we can be. Unfortunately, the power to see and touch XML data now seems a lot less ubiquitous than it did a couple of weeks ago. InfoPath will be bundled only with the volume-licensed Enterprise Edition of Office 2003. It will also be available as a standalone. Customer-defined schemas in Word and Excel will be supported in the Enterprise and Pro editions, but not in the Standard. Microsoft argues that because Pro outsells Standard at retail, and because businesses prefer Enterprise , the stratification of the XML offerings is a customer-driven response... Microsoft now sees schema support and InfoPath as an enterprise play that might -- or might not --trickle down. I think they're an enterprise play too, but I reject the trickle-down theory. The most vibrant XML applications today are coming from the grassroots up, in the form of RSS-enabled Weblogs... An enterprise can't simply equip all its people with the Enterprise edition of Office and assume it will only do business with other enterprises that are so equipped. The RSS network crosses all boundaries. So does e-mail... The future of XML on the desktop is far from certain. Now is not the time to segment a market that has only just begun to grow. I hope Microsoft will reconsider. And I trust that the competition is paying attention..." See: (1) "Microsoft Office 11 and InfoPath [XDocs]"; (2) "XML File Formats for Office Documents."

• [April 26, 2003] "Web Services Creation Made Easy. Beta of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 Insulates Developers from J2EE Trials and Tribulations." By Rick Grehan. In InfoWorld (April 25, 2003). "BEA WebLogic Workshop is a combination development/run-time environment, very much in the spirit of IBM's WebSphere Application Developer. But WebLogic Workshop exclusively generates J2EE applications, and it operates at a dizzying level of abstraction compared with similar tools. Whereas J2EE was all about abstracting low-level entities such as database rows and message queues, WebLogic Workshop is all about abstracting J2EE... BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 is a unique development environment for creating J2EE Web services that run atop the WebLogic application server. The developer does little interacting with J2EE itself, so you need only a moderate to advanced understanding of Java and very little understanding of J2EE, to build Web services with the Workshop. This allows for the rapid creation of J2EE applications, yet it also means tethering to a specific metaphor, toolset, run-time framework, and app server. Nevertheless, Workshop's handling of XML is something other development environments should pursue. BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 is available in two editions. The Application Developer Edition provides the basic development, testing, and deployment tools described here. The Platform Edition adds capabilities for developing portal applications and is designed to be used in conjunction with BEA's WebLogic Portal 8.1 and WebLogic Integration 8.1.. SOAP is the lifeblood of a Workshop Web service, and XML forms its corpuscles. All interactions between components of a Workshop-built J2EE application, as well as between clients and services, communicate via XML wrapped in SOAP. At multiple points of execution, therefore, your code must read and write XML messages. The Workshop provides two tools for this: the XQuery mapper and XMLBeans. The XQuery mapper reads an XML schema on one side, an input method to a Web service control on the other side, and allows you to graphically connect the two. A developer can literally drag connecting lines from nodes of a parsed XML schema view on one side and connect them to Java object members on the other. The Workshop does the rest; at run time, XML messages will be unpacked and their contents delivered to the proper object members. XMLBeans take a more procedural approach. The Workshop reads the schema, and produces a bean whose methods allow your application to read, write, and modify XML message elements. All the while, the XMLBean maintains the fidelity of the XML message itself..."

• [April 26, 2003] "Programming for the 21st Century -- o:XML." By Jeff Davies. In ZDNet News (April 25, 2003). "Some years ago, I had an idea about an XML programming language, and made a DTD and XSL to convert the program in XML to Java through transformation via XSLT. Like all good ideas, I was by far and away only one of many with the same idea (having searched sourceforge for similar projects). At the time, I made contact with Martin Klang who had made far more progress on a project with the same idea. Time passed and I lost the files, but recently I recreated them and made a sourceforge project. Then, out of the blue, an e-mail arrived from Martin Klang announcing the availability of ObjectBox 1.0. This is currently closed-source license, but he's going to release the next version under GPL or similar license. Whereas I and many others had sat on our hands with our ideas, Martin had been working away, and actually developed a working product. It is currently limited to Servlet type applications, but there is no reason why (for example) the Linux Kernel can't be written in XML. See www.o-xml.org to download ObjectBox or look at object oriented XML programming language (o-xml) specification. o:XML is actually great for Servlets since XML and HTML can be more easily embedded in the code than say Perl, cgibin, or PHP by virtue of the fact you can use a full XML Editor like XMLSpy to edit the code... As XML Parsers are comparatively easy to implement and use, editors have the same parser in them, and therefore can display the hierarchical structure of the program in a tree format easily. Note: such is the nature of XML and the tools that from a given bit of code in XML, you could easily produce C or Java source code, or indeed, Assembler, or through a more custom SAX based parser, even a Machine code generating Transformation tool. The simplicity and plugability of the overall solution makes it easy to add management layers to the code (like auditing, like integration of functional specification). The move to XML should also make searching for similar blocks of code simpler. This means you can refactor using XP more easily : making sure there are not multiple bits of code doing the same thing in many places, the intention of course to reduce software maintenance costs. Therefore, I see the move to an XML Programming Language as a precursor to a new generation of cheaper, high-quality, bloat-free software..." See "The o:XML Programming Language," by Martin Klang.

• [April 26, 2003] "XML for Data: Reuse It Or Lose It, Part 2. Understanding Reusable Components." By Kevin Williams (CEO, Blue Oxide Technologies, LLC). From IBM developerWorks, XML zone. April 25, 2003. ['In his last column, Kevin Williams explained how component-level reuse in XML designs can decrease code complexity and shorten maintenance cycles. In this article, the second in a series of three, he describes the types of components that can be reused in XML designs and provides examples of each in XML and XML Schema.'] "Now that I've explained the why of component-level reuse in XML document design, I'll delve into the what. Understanding the types of components that you can reuse in XML documents -- and the advantages to doing so -- will help you to identify good reuse opportunities and take advantage of them... The most atomic design construct you can reuse is the datatype. A datatype usually takes one of the built-in datatypes from XML Schema (or another user-defined datatype) and restricts it in some way... Enumerations are lumped together with datatypes in XML Schema, but they are different enough from other datatypes that they deserve their own discussion. An enumeration is a list of allowable values for a particular text-only element or attribute. The classic example is the list of all the states in the United States... As you move higher up the reuse food chain, you start to exit the world of XML Schema and enter the world of Web services. It's a bit out of scope for this column, but I'll just mention that higher-order artifacts -- operations, services, and even orchestrated flows -- can be built up out of these reusable building blocks. For example, you might define a getQuote operation that takes a tickerSymbol datapoint (reused) as its input and returns a stockInfo structure (reused) as its output. A service might then implement the getQuote operation (reused) at a particular endpoint and with particular bindings... XML design can be complicated and cumbersome. With the rapid proliferation of XML designs throughout the enterprise, you're in for significant headaches if you don't take the time to see how you can reuse these design artifacts up front. While a good approach to reuse isn't necessarily going to address design requirements for an entire application, most design efforts can probably leverage some existing structures, datapoints, datatypes, and enumerations, and then add just those components that are unique to a particular task. In the next column, I'll show you some approaches to implementing these reusable components in the enterprise..."

• [April 26, 2003] "Tibco Promotes Flexibility Through BPM and Analytics." By [Staff]. In ComputerWeekly.com (April 25, 2003). "You would think that Tibco Software, an early innovator and leader in enterprise application integration (EAI), would be heavily promoting the addition of open-standard web services interfaces to its traditional messaging architecture and library of EAI adapters. But because web services interfaces have become mandatory for all integration products it has become tough to differentiate based on open protocols. So Tibco is focusing on enabling the dynamic enterprise by putting business process management (BPM) and analytics functionality higher in the stack. In the early days of the real-time enterprise -- the 1990s -- Tibco pioneered messaging and integration technologies for demanding markets such as brokerage trading desks, where packets of information had to be there in a fraction of a second. The supplier then prospered by packaging these tools and selling them as part of an integration server that could tie together any number of diverse applications and legacy systems. Today, Tibco and other pure-play integration suppliers, including WebMethods, Vitria and SeeBeyond, are on a collision course with application suppliers, which have realised the value in providing integration middleware themselves. Other suppliers, such as IBM and BEA Systems, pose a threat as they incorporate both integration and higher-level capabilities into the application server... The supplier is developing vertical, market-specific solutions that try to help enterprise IT leaders leverage the data already running through their pipes. Tibco has developed BPM tools, such as BusinessWorks, that allow enterprise IT managers to define modular business logic components and then to quickly and flexibly reuse them in different business processes as the need arises -- for example, if a product or partner changes or in a mergers and acquisitions situation. The supplier also recently introduced a business optimisation dashboard product called BusinessFactor, which aims to deliver real-time performance management technology, for example, for greater supply-chain visibility. Tibco's chief strategist Ram Menon described it as "closed-loop integration: Connect it together, see what's going on, understand it and react to it'..."

• [April 26, 2003] "Judge Upholds Law Requiring ISPs to Name Downloaders. Critics Say Ruling is Big Blow to Internet Users' Privacy." By Grant Gross. In InfoWorld (April 25, 2003). "A U.S. federal judge has again sided with the recording industry in its efforts to subpoena the name of a music downloader, upholding a portion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that requires Internet service providers to turn over names of alleged copyright infringers. Critics said the law provides a cheap and easy way for music companies, or anyone else, to find out the names of anonymous Internet users... Verizon, along with 28 consumer and privacy groups and 18 other ISPs and ISP organizations, argued against the subpoenas, which are issued by a court clerk, not a judge, when a copyright holder has a reasonable suspicion of a violation. Verizon argued that the DMCA subpoenas only apply when the files are hosted on the ISP's network, not on a customer's computer. Verizon also argued that the clerk-issued subpoenas open up a potential for abuse, with anyone wanting to know the name of an anonymous Internet user, including pedophiles and stalkers, able to claim a copyright violation and get a subpoena... Verizon said it will appeal Bates' decision, and the company is currently fighting a second subpoena from the RIAA. John Thorne, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for Verizon, said in a statement the company will immediately seek a stay of Bates' order in the U.S. Court of Appeals. The decision goes beyond protecting 'copyright monopolists,' he added in the statement. 'This decision exposes anyone who uses the Internet to potential predators, scam artists and crooks, including identity thieves and stalkers,' Thorne added. 'We will continue to use every legal means available to protect our subscribers' privacy'..."

• [April 24, 2003] "XML Grows... and Slows." By Jim Ericson. In Line56 (April 24, 2003). "With standards adoption spreading, some wonder if a messaging glut will lead to infrastructure overload. XML standards and specifications are more and more coming to bear on a variety of business processes inside and outside the four walls in support of new architectures that are flexible and loosely coupled. XML-based messaging in the form of Web services will dominate deployment of new application solutions by 2004, according to Gartner Inc. Gartner sees some 80 percent of all platform vendors now supporting Web service architectures, which it calls the 'next generation of platform middleware.' We can't name all the standards groups out there, but we're all familiar with the effects of too much of a good thing. The openness and flexibility of XML that serves machine and human interactions also comes with a layer of abstraction that is verbose and nested with content that requires extra processing. Performance degrades as messages and their accompanying security, encryption and digital signatures start to pile up. Now, some people are beginning to ask whether a looming glut of XML messaging will become the Los Angeles freeway of network traffic and data processing. 'There's a limit to how fast XML-based messaging can ever run,' says Joshua Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications consulting. 'When you see where all the vendors are moving, like SAP with NetWeaver, there's an assumption [of increasing message traffic]. Until we have a way to speed the marshaling of XML, we'll end up hoping customers won't implement that many message streams in parallel'... By various estimates, the arrival of pervasive XML message traffic is anywhere from two to 10 years out. But we're already seeing workarounds to manifestations of the processing problem. Some portal users are adopting batch updates from offline portal specialist BackWeb over real-time connectivity to better address data latency. Another company, Cysive, advocates the use of native language calls over XML behind the firewall as a way to improve data performance..."

• [April 23, 2003] "SIMPLE-XMPP Interworking." By Daniel-Constantin Mierla (Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Germany). IETF Network Working Group, Internet-Draft. Reference: 'draft-mierla-simple-xmpp-interworking-00'. April 23, 2003, expires October 22, 2003. "This document describes the behavior for the logical entity known as the SIMPLE-XMPP Interworking Function (SIMPLE-XMPP IWF) that will allow the interworking between the SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) and XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol - also known as Jabber protocol) protocols... SIMPLE [Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Extension for Instant Messaging] extends the Session Initiation Protocol with Instant Messaging and Presence functionality. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) [SIP: Session Initiation Protocol] was designed to initiate and manipulate media 'sessions' between communicating parties. XMPP is an XML-based streaming protocol designed for Instant Messaging and Presence. The primary objective of a SIMPLE-XMPP Interworking function (IWF) is to provide protocol conversion between SIMPLE and XMPP protocols. The document describes the requirements and behavior of the SIMPLE-XMPP Interworking function for conversion of the SIMPLE and XMPP protocols. How to use SIP to initiate XMPP chat sessions or how to initiate sessions over XMPP are not the subject of the present document... [Functionally,] SIMPLE-XMPP IWF can be designed in various ways. This may include coexistence of SIMPLE Servers and/or XMPP Servers with IWF. The co-location of the SIMPLE server and/or XMPP server in conjunction with the IWF is a matter of implementation and not a protocol issue. There shall be no assumptions made for the optional elements and components present in either SIMPLE or XMPP networks. The solution provided here shall work for a minimum configuration required for both protocols. There may be recommendations for other configurations, which include optional components..." See: "Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)." [cache]

• [April 23, 2003] "An SVG Case Study: Integrated, Dynamic Avalanche Forecasting." By Chris Cochella and Tyler Cruickshank. From XML.com (April 23, 2003). ['An article on using SVG to present integrated information on skiing weather conditions.'] "... We are avid backcountry skiers (backcountry snow conditions are not considered generally useful). A wise backcountry skier is always aware of the specific local and regional weather conditions in the mountains that contribute to avalanche danger. For winter backcountry enthusiasts like us, the problem is that all of the weather data available (i.e., National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's National Weather Service) from remote mountain stations and ski areas is scattered throughout the Web -- in various formats, of varying frequency, contained in difficult to read text files, and differing in measured parameters. Cobbling this information together at 6AM prior to skiing is not our idea of fun. Thus, our goal is to collect all of this data in one place and then graphically display related parameters in a Web information appliance. We call this appliance the Avalanche Meteorology Toolkit (AMT) [requires SVG plugin; see also Avalanche.org]. The process of bringing all this information together is messy. But it can be done by using Perl to do data clean up, handing off to a MySQL database for storage, and then to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for a lightweight graphics display, which can be viewed by Adobe's SVG Plugin. The article Data-Driven SVG Apps by Pramod Jain is useful for understanding the multi-tier approach (data storage, data processing, display)... Our solution requires five steps, utilizes two Perl scripts, one SVG information appliance interface, and one SVG file for each weather station... The primary benefits of our approach are the integration of disparate information sources into a single, lightweight display of relevant real-time information. Perl, or course, is great for text processing. SVG along with Adobe's server-connection capability has proven to be a very flexible and lightweight means of information display. We are planning the integration of additional dynamic information like avalanche pictures posted by the public, integration of the Utah Avalanche Center forecast advisory, and a regional map of recent avalanches. By combining all this information in one place, backcountry travelers and avalanche forecasters have been able to quickly assess backcountry conditions and make appropriate, informed decisions. There is no end to the possibilities for creating dynamic, lightweight displays of real-time data: other scientific monitoring devices, traffic monitoring, manufacturing processes, financial data, and so on..." See also: (1) "An Internet Based Snow Stability Toolkit for the Temporal and Spatial Display of Meteorological, Snow Stability, and Avalanche Related Data for Forecasters and Backcountry Users"; (2) SVG Essentials, by J. David Eisenberg. General references in "W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)."

• [April 23, 2003] "At Microsoft's Mercy." By Kendall Grant Clark. From XML.com (April 23, 2003). ['The future of XML editing is largely in Microsoft's hands, observes Kendall Clark.'] "Even after five long years of XML development, the ideal and ubiquitous 'XML editor for humans' seems more rumor than reality. Could it be that we have underestimated the difficulty of building a tool with which ordinary people can easily and simply create XML content? What troubles me even more, however, was the conclusion I reached in that column, namely, that the XML creation facilities in the next major release of Microsoft Office are the best, realistic hope for the future of the documents side of XML, at least in terms of mass market success. No other entity in the industry (in any industry, for that matter) is as able to swing mass numbers of computers users toward or away from specific technological solutions. That conclusion troubled me then and troubles me today not only because of Microsoft's spotted history, but also because, if it's at all correct, it's not an enviable position for XML to occupy. A significant part of the robust vision of XML's success is the documents part of the XML application spectrum. The potential of XML will not be maximized unless or until it is used to exchange documents, freeing people and organizations from an inappropriate reliance on proprietary document-creation infrastructure and tools. But relying on one company to create ubiquitous end-user tools is no more a good position to occupy than is the one in which the people and organizations rely on a single vendor for proprietary access to their documents and data. In other words, XML is important as a document exchange format insofar as it prevents (or, at least, mitigates) proprietary vendor lock-in, for both people and organizations. The XML industry must seek to avoid finding itself in a similar position, namely, one in which it relies upon Microsoft to make XML creation tools for end users ubiquitous. Of course, there are many smaller vendors which are building XML creation tools, many of which are very well designed and engineered. But smaller vendors can only do so much to influence or to oppose the juggernaut... Microsoft's decision to offer the really interesting XML bits of the new Office only in its high-end versions is likely not to be as harmful to as many relevant parties as it might first appear, though it does reaffirm the prudential wisdom of assuming the worst about Microsoft and waiting to be pleasantly surprised by the unexpected..."

• [April 23, 2003] "Online Magazines with Apache Cocoon." By Steve Punte. From XML.com (April 23, 2003). ['Apache Cocoon makes publishing magazines easy. Steven Punte brings together HTML and RSS documents to show how Cocoon's XML-directed architecture lends itself to elegant publishing solutions.'] "In order to demonstrate what I call XML-directed solutions using Apache Cocoon, in this article I will discuss how to use Cocoon to create an online magazine. XML-directed solutions are those where XML, rather than a programming language is used to control the application. If you are considering entering into the world of online publications or are thinking about upgrading your existing technology, consider how elegantly Apache Cocoon provides a publishing framework... In this article I examine a very simple and elegant two-layer solution for online publishing; it presents articles stored in a local repository or directly utilizes feeds from other online magazines and new services. It turns out that the management of articles and of news stories is very similar, and much of this type content is converging on the use of RSS. Thus, an appropriate architectural tactic is to divide the problem into two parts: the article repository layer and the presentation layer... A key architectural feature of this solution is that no application-specific Java or other procedural software is required. All necessary functionality and operation is achieved using existing off-the-shelf Apache Cocoon components, supplying them with appropriate XML configuration information. Such solutions are "XML directed architectures" and are expected to play an increasingly dominant role thanks to the software component interoperability that XML provides... While still in its infancy, component solutions directed by XML configurations are becoming viable and production-worthy ways of building web applications. Apache Cocoon excels in the territory of content presentation solutions and is making progress at addressing more interactive behavior situations with Apache Struts-like additions. The entire application presented in this article is contained in one Cocoon sitemap file and a handful of XSLT templates. Both these files define behavior and can be seen as an application layer on top of a generic, technology-agnostic XML framework. In my next article for XML.com, I will present a generalization of such a framework, which I call X2EE..." See also the X2EE White Paper.

• [April 23, 2003] "Northrop's Latest Patent: Legitimate or Just 'A Silly Claim'? The Worldwide i-Technology Community Responds." By Jeremy Geelan. In XML Journal (April 23, 2003). "In an odd twist, even though the WWW was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 and the first public release of a WWW client and server was in 1991, such 'prior art' (as it is known in patent circles) seems not to have discouraged New Jersey-based Charlie Northrup from claiming patent number 6,546,413 ['Access Method Independent Exchange Using a Communication Primitive']. The result -- for the US Office of Patents and Trademarks granted it after many years of deliberation -- according to many commentators including Maureen O'Gara of LinuxGram, is that Northrup now holds the patent on nothing less universal than what we now call 'Web services'... The claim that Northrup's ideas on Web services are the earliest is 'rot,' according to Uche Ogbuji of Fourthought, Inc. Ogbuji calls it 'a silly claim'... Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML, is equally dismissive. 'Charlie contacted me a couple of times [and] I told him that in my view that patent should not have been granted, and would not stand up in court, due to having failed the 'obviousness' test. Clearly he disagrees.' Bray adds a very strong cautionary note. 'If [Northrup] managed to enforce his claim the consequences would be disastrous; it would become impossible to have Open Source implementations of key pieces of the infrastructure. This would be harmful, perhaps fatal, to the grand plans of those who want to deploy Web services everywhere.' Veteran markup specialist Len Bullard isn't any more sanguine than Bray. 'I can't understand such a patent,' he says. 'There is too much prior art and research in this field. Web services are coming about as a result of standardization, not innovation.' Bullard points out an odd precedent, on the other hand. 'The patent on stylesheets held by Microsoft,' he notes, 'has never been challenged although the prior art again, is well documented. And the Sun patent on hyperlinking was the same kind of patent: bogus but unchallenged.' 'Unfortunately,' Bullard continues, 'our patent system has come down to a contest of money, lawyers, and stamina because the patent office does not have the expertise or resources to verify obscure claims'..." [Patent application #211266 was filed December 14, 1998, and patent #6,546,413 was granted April 8, 2003. Abstract: "The present invention provides a virtual network, sitting 'above' the physical connectivity and thereby providing the administrative controls necessary to link various communication devices via an Access-Method-Independent Exchange. In this sense, the Access-Method-Independent Exchange can be viewed as providing the logical connectivity required. In accordance with the present invention, connectivity is provided by a series of communication primitives designed to work with each of the specific communication devices in use. As new communication devices are developed, primitives can be added to the Access-Method-Independent Exchange to support these new devices without changing the application source code. A Thread Communication Service is provided, along with a Binding Service to link Communication Points. A Thread Directory Service is available, as well as a Broker Service and a Thread Communication Switching Service. Intraprocess, as well as Interprocess, services are available. Dynamic Configuration Management and a Configurable Application Program Service provide software which can be commoditized, as well as upgraded while in operation."] See: "Patents and Open Standards."

• [April 23, 2003] "New Technologies Face Legal Headaches." By Lisa M Bowman. In ZDNet News (April 22, 2003). "Companies face a host of legal land mines that they need to consider when developing emerging technology, attorneys at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference told developers Tuesday. The attorneys said companies are increasingly wielding patent and copyright laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to thwart competitors and maintain their market share. As a result, the attorneys said, we're heading toward a world where companies increasingly need to consider the legal ramifications of their products... Already, the DMCA has seeped into the market for printer cartridges and garage door openers. Printer maker Lexmark International and automatic garage door maker Skylink successfully have wielded the DMCA to ward off competitors who wanted to develop toners and garage door openers that would interoperate with their products. In both cases, the companies claimed that the competitors broke their protection measures... Von Lohmann said companies that provide automatic updates may come under fire because intellectual property owners could argue that such companies could send out a kill patch if they suspect or learn about a copyright infringement. He said companies such as Microsoft and other software makers that automatically update are starting to worry about such scenarios. 'These issues come up in back rooms all the time,' he said. Von Lohmann also predicted that more and more companies will build authentication measures into their products so that they can wield the DMCA to quash competitors. The law makes the act of breaking authentication measures illegal. 'They will invoke the DMCA to prevent anyone from interoperating with their systems,' he said. For example, he said, companies in the instant messaging market, long a battlefield in the interoperability wars, could build some authentication code into their products and then sue anyone who cracks the digital handshakes. The move would discourage competitors from developing products that interoperate because they would have to break the authentication code to do so, an act that could violate the DMCA... Emerging companies also need to be wary of patent claims, according to Fenwick & West lawyer Rajiv Patel. Patel said the biggest trend for companies in the down economy is increasingly leveraging their patents to make money through licensing fees. 'It's an opportunity to generate revenue,' Patel said. He said many companies also are using patents to quash competitors, hoping they'll be discouraged by the costs of fighting patent claims. He said companies can burn through as much as US$50,000 to US$500,000 per month defending themselves against such claims. He urged small companies to develop a patents strategy and portfolio that will work as a strong defence against future claims. Right now, he said, there's a patent landgrab in the wireless communications, security, nanotechnology and biotechnology markets..." See: "Patents and Open Standards." See: "Patents and Open Standards."

• [April 22, 2003] "Inside Cisco's Eavesdropping Apparatus." By Declan McCullagh. In CNet News.com (April 21, 2003). "Cisco Systems has created a more efficient and targeted way for police and intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on people whose Internet service provider uses their company's routers. The company recently published a proposal that describes how it plans to embed 'lawful interception' capability into its products. Among the highlights: Eavesdropping 'must be undetectable,' and multiple police agencies conducting simultaneous wiretaps must not learn of one another. If an Internet provider uses encryption to preserve its customers' privacy and has access to the encryption keys, it must turn over the intercepted communications to police in a descrambled form. Cisco's decision to begin offering 'lawful interception' capability as an option to its customers could turn out to be either good or bad news for privacy... Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says: 'I don't see why the technical community should hardwire surveillance standards and not also hardwire accountability standards like audit logs and public reporting. The laws that permit 'lawful interception' typically incorporate both components -- the (interception) authority and the means of oversight -- but the (Cisco) implementation seems to have only the surveillance component. That is no guarantee that the authority will be used in a 'lawful' manner'... if you don't like Cisco's decision, remember that they're not the ones doing the snooping. Cisco is responding to its customers' requests, and if they don't, other hardware vendors will. Cisco's Internet draft may be titled 'lawful interception,' but there's no guarantee that the capability will always be used legally. If you're looking for someone to blame, consider Attorney General John Ashcroft, who asked for and received sweeping surveillance powers in the USA Patriot Act, along with your elected representatives in Congress, who gave those powers to him with virtually no debate..." See also: OASIS LegalXML Lawful Intercept Technical Committee.

• [April 22, 2003] "End-to-End Object Encryption in XMPP." By Peter Saint-Andre (Jabber Software Foundation) and Joe Hildebrand (Jabber, Inc). IETF Network Working Group, Internet-Draft. Reference: 'draft-ietf-xmpp-e2e-02'. April 21, 2003, expires October 20, 2003. 18 pages. "This document describes an end-to-end signing and encryption method for use in the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) as defined by XMPP Core and XMPP Instant Messaging. Object signing and encryption enable a sender to encrypt an XML stanza sent to a specific recipient, sign such a stanza, sign broadcasted presence, and signal support for the method defined herein. This document thereby helps the XMPP specifications meet the requirements defined in RFC 2779 ['Instant Messaging / Presence Protocol Requirements']... For the purposes of this document, we stipulate the following requirements: (1) Encryption must work with any stanza type (message, presence, or IQ). (2) The full XML stanza must be encrypted. (3) Encryption must be possible using either OpenPGP or S/MIME. (4) It must be possible to sign encrypted content. (5) It must be possible to sign broadcasted presence. (6) Any namespaces used must conform to The IETF XML Registry..." See: "Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)." [cache]

• [April 22, 2003] "Securing Digital Content." By Dennis Fisher. In eWEEK (April 22, 2003). "As Microsoft Corp. prepares to release the beta version of its anticipated and controversial Rights Management Services, a small security company has been quietly working on technology that could trump Microsoft's and make it easier for companies to control digital content... Cryptography Research Inc. has developed a technology that associates security measures with each piece of content instead of using a generic protection scheme for all copies. The security measures are contained in code that runs on a virtual machine inside a playback device. As the content is decrypted during playback, the virtual machine uses APIs in the playback device to determine whether or how the playback should proceed. The architecture includes a digital watermarking function that would let content owners identify every legal copy of a given piece of content. If a legal copy is duplicated, the illegal version could be traced. Under this system, each playback device would have a unique set of keys for decrypting content. The concept, which the company calls self-protecting digital content, grew from research to uncover a DRM (digital rights management) solution amenable to everyone in the debate over mandating copy protection. 'Both sides are missing the point. Mandating copy protection isn't realistic,' said Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research, based here. 'But [content owners] have a real problem. Piracy is illegal, and my job is to solve the security problem.' Kocher said the company has had discussions with Hollywood studios about licensing the technology..." See: "XML and Digital Rights Management (DRM)."

• [April 22, 2003] "BINPIDF: External Object Extension to Presence Information Data Format." By Mikko Lonnfors, Eva Leppanen, and Hisham Khartabil (Nokia). IETF SIMPLE WG, Internet-Draft. Reference: 'draft-lonnfors-simple-binpidf-00'. April 7, 2003, expires October 6, 2003. "This memo specifies a methodology whereby external content to a presence information document can be referenced in XML encoded presence information document (PIDF). The external content can be either transferred directly in the payload of SIP messages or indirectly as an HTTP reference. The external part might contain binary data such as images. The Presence Information Data Format (PIDF) is described in Common Presence and Instant Messaging (CPIM) Presence Information Data Format. It defines a generic XML encoded format to express a presentity's presence information. However, it does not specify any mechanism how external objects, e.g., pictures, belonging to presence information can be represented in such XML documents. The Content Indirection document provides an extension to the URL MIME External-Body Access-Type to allow any MIME part in a SIP message to be referred indirectly via a URL. In addition there is a need to specify an extension to PIDF in order to use the Content Indirection mechanism for the Presence in a way that the XML encoded presence information is carried directly in SIP message while external objects are referenced indirectly. There is also need to deliver the external objects in the payload of a SIP message. The MIME Multipart/Related content type provides a good basis for placing a reference to external contents as multiparts. An extension to PIDF is needed for referencing the multiparts from the PIDF XML formatted presence information. A similar kind of approach of utilizing the MIME Multipart/Related with HTML can be found in 'MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents' (RFC 2557)..." See related references in "Common Profile for Instant Messaging (CPIM)." [cache]

• [April 22, 2003] "XML and Java Technologies. Data Binding Part 4: JiBX Usage." By Dennis M. Sosnoski (President, Sosnoski Software Solutions, Inc). From IBM developerWorks, XML zone. April 18, 2003. ['Part 3 described the JiBX internal structure; now find out how you actually use JiBX for flexible binding of Java objects to XML. JiBX lead developer Dennis Sosnoski shows you how to work with his new framework for XML data binding in Java applications. With the binding definitions used by JiBX, you control virtually all aspects of marshalling and unmarshalling, including handling structural differences between your XML documents and the corresponding Java language objects. Want to refactor your code without changing the XML representation? With JiBX you can.'] "[Here] in Part 4, you'll find out how to use the power of this Java-centric approach to data binding in your applications. Most other data binding frameworks for the Java language force you to supply a DTD or W3C XML Schema grammar for your documents, then generate a collection of classes from that grammar. You need to work with these generated classes to use the frameworks, but in most cases you have little or no control over the classes -- they're basically JavaBean-type wrappers around simple data structures along with some added framework code. The whole point of these generated classes is to provide an interface for working with data from your XML documents. The JavaBean wrapper approach is sometimes presented as object-oriented because of the use of get/set methods to access data. In reality, it's about as far from true object-oriented development as you can get, because of the lack of extensibility in the data objects. True object-oriented programming means that objects hide their internal state and implement their own behaviors for working with that state information. This is typically not possible with the generated code approaches. With JiBX, binding to XML is treated as an aspect that applies to your classes, not as the primary purpose of those classes. Thus, you use object-oriented designs that are appropriate to your application. It also gives you the freedom to refactor your classes without needing to change the bound XML document structure. This aspect-oriented approach even lets you define multiple bindings to be used with the same classes, so that you can work with multiple input or output XML document structures without having to change your code..."

• [April 22, 2003] "OASIS WS Business Process Execution Language TC Formed." By Lawrence Wilkes. In CBDI Journal (April 22, 2003). "The decision to form WSBPEL reflects the approach that IBM and Microsoft have taken so far in moving the various specifications they have proposed along with others into a standards process. Namely, one of refining and completing their already well-defined specification, rather than making a contribution (along with alternative proposals) to a broader process which might ultimately yield something quite different to their original specification, or at least be harder work in terms of reaching consensus. Though some of their competitors might claim that IBM and Microsoft are not being open' enough by adopting this stance, it is in reality a fairly common approach to standards setting. i.e. take a well defined specification with the backing of industry leaders and endorse that, as opposed to the typically slower process of design by committee. It also reflects the different way that W3C and OASIS work. Whereas W3C seem to take a more architected' approach, trying to ensure that each specification has its proper place, OASIS appears to have a looser philosophy -- if enough members want a committee, then they shall have one, regardless of whether there is overlap with other initiatives. It is up to the membership to sort such issues out, not the OASIS board. As such, it is easier for IBM and Microsoft to take their existing specifications (previous example is WS-Security) forward. It will therefore now be interesting to see how IBM and Microsoft respond to the recent formation by IONA, Oracle, Sun, and others of the OASIS WS Reliable Messaging TC. With a well-defined alternative of their own, will IBM and Microsoft form an alternative TC at OASIS? Or go to W3C instead? The decision by existing W3C WS-Choreography Working Group members (notably SAP, Novell, Tibco) to now join the OASIS initiative will leave the W3C initiative in a difficult position. Does it focus on developing WSCI? Even though the broader industry backing is shifting to BPEL, which does everything WSCI does and more? [...] Organizations, certainly the larger ones, may find themselves in a situation where in the near term at least they will need to support more than one business processing language/interface to reflect the needs of different partners, as well as continuing to support existing EDI and B2B interfaces. A good SOA strategy will be essentially in such situations to abstract services away from the multiple interface technologies in use... Perhaps there is room for two (or more) competing standards', and let the market eventually decide which one wins. This does run the risk that customers will slow their adoption as they wait the outcome of the eventually winner..." See details in "OASIS Forms Web Services Business Process Execution Language TC (WSBPEL)." General references in "Business Process Management and Choreography."

• [April 22, 2003] "Review of Encoded Archival Description on the Internet." By Helen R. Tibbo (School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). In D-Lib Magazine Volume 9, Number 4 (April 2003). ISSN: 1082-9873. Review of the book edited by Daniel V. Pitti and Wendy M. Duff. "In the introduction, Pitti and Duff note that they hope this collection of eleven papers 'will provide an effective introduction to archival description and EAD, a useful overview of its use in various contexts, and an insight into its potential to revolutionize archival practices and services and to democratize and extend access to archival resources.' The text, initially published as volume 4, numbers 3/4 2001 of the Journal of Internet Cataloging, succeeds admirably in these goals. Each article is informative and the compilation provides an excellent introduction to Encoded Archival Description and contextualization for its use. The articles discuss the fundamentals of archival arrangement and description and illustrate how EAD facilitates descriptive practice and extends reference and access in an electronic networked environment. EAD, a data structure standard and encoding scheme initially built as an SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) DTD (Document Type Definition) for the encoding of electronic archival finding aids, is now an XML (Extensible Markup Language) compliant scheme. EAD maintains the multilevel and hierarchical nature of finding aids and facilitates structured presentation and searching of these tools in networked environments such as the World Wide Web... as new metadata models, initiatives, and standards appear at a dizzying pace, the archival profession and, more broadly, the digital library arena need a thorough analysis of the relationship among these tools. Increasingly, archival institutions and other cultural heritage repositories are concerned that their collection metadata be compliant with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) so that it can be harvested for inclusion in large union repositories built around the Dublin Core standard. Yet, OAI captures but a tiny fraction of the information resident in most finding aids and is even less rich than MARC records, which archivists have long lamented for their inability to represent hierarchical archival metadata. Studies of the relationship between the data represented in EAD, MARC, and the OAI standard are needed and must be analyzed in relationship to how archival users search for information. When will it be most efficacious for researchers to use search OAI records in large national or international databases? When will it be best for them to search the Web for the finding aids themselves? Will MARC records in repository online catalogs continue to play a vital role between the OAI and EAD levels of complexity? How will repositories invest in all these metadata schemes so as to best preserve and make accessible their materials?" General references in "Encoded Archival Description (EAD)."

• [April 22, 2003] "RSS Needs Fixing." By Tim Bray. In ongoing (April 22, 2003). "There are two big problems with RSS that aren't going away and are just going to have to be fixed to avoid a train-wreck, given the way the RSS thing is taking off. They are first, what can go in a "description" element, and second, the issue of relative URIs... This essay tries to illustrate the problems it talks about. In its RSS description, it tries to mention the <description> tag, with the angle brackets visible, and it contains a relative reference to another ongoing article; one or both of these may have failed in your aggregator... RSS is no longer a science experiment, it's becoming an important part of the infrastructure, which means that a lot of programmmers are going to get the assignment of generating and parsing it, and they need better instructions." General references in "RDF Site Summary (RSS)."

• [April 21, 2003] "Thinking XML: Introducing N-Triples. A Simpler Serialization for RDF." By Uche Ogbuji (Principal Consultant, Fourthought, Inc). From IBM developerWorks, XML zone. April 8, 2003. ['RDF/XML isn't the only representation of an RDF model. The W3C developed N-Triples, a format for an RDF representation that is especially suited for test suites. Here, Uche Ogbuji introduces N-Triples using examples converted from RDF/XML.'] "In an earlier article, I used the heading "Repeat after me: There is no syntax". RDF's traditional XML syntax is often maligned, but luckily it is not what makes RDF tick, and the emergence of alternative serializations has always been inevitable. One problem with XML as a serialization syntax is that it is so flexible that it can be difficult to compare desired versus actual results in the process of automated testing. Whether in regression testing or conformance testing, it is often useful to try to normalize XML to some form so that simple text comparisons give meaningful results. The XML community developed XML canonical form for such purposes, and the W3C RDF working group required the same sort of form for RDF while it was developing RDF conformance test suites. One option is to define a canonical form of RDF/XML that matches any graphs, and then canonicalize the resulting XML according to the relevant W3C recommendation. Instead, I think the RDF working group chose the right course in developing a simple and strictly-defined textual format for RDF graphs. This format is named N-Triples, and is incorporated into the RDF Test Cases working draft. In this article I introduce N-Triples, using examples converted from RDF/XML... I do not cover a few nuances; for example, a very strict set of characters is allowed in the syntax, and you must be careful to escape any characters outside these ranges. Some characters (in URI references) must be escaped using URI conventions, and others use an N-Triples convention with a leading backslash. If you are writing code to read or write N-Triples, be sure to see the specification for these details. One of several efforts aimed at a simple triples-based representation for RDF includes N3, which is pretty popular and is the source of some of the ideas in N-Triples. But N-Triples has the advantage of being written into a formal specification, and because of its use in the standard RDF test cases, will probably be implemented by all RDF processors..." See "Resource Description Framework (RDF)."

• [April 18, 2003] "RSS 2.0." By Mark Nottingham [WWW]. IETF Network Working Group, Internet-Draft. Reference: 'draft-nottingham-rss2-00'. April 9, 2003, expires October 8, 2003. "This specification documents version 2.0 of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), an XML-based format for syndicating Web content and metadata. This specification provides stable documentation for the RSS 2.0 format [