Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 27 March 2007
A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org
Edited by Robin Cover

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This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by
BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com

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HEADLINES:

* Oracle Joins Linux Patent Commons
* OASIS Approves New Web Services Security Standards
* Last Call Review for Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 2.0
* ODF Group A Year Old, But Format Still Unproven
* Using Axis2 and JiBX: Turn XML Into a Fully Functional Web Service
* BEA Delivers Web 2.0 Enteprise Tools
* O'Reilly Book Notice: Schematron

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Oracle Joins Linux Patent Commons
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Linux-Watch

Oracle and the Open Invention Network (OIN) announced that Oracle will
become an OIN licensee. By doing this, Oracle opens the doors to
making some of its patents available royalty-free to any company,
institution, or individual that agrees not to assert its patents
against Linux. OIN members -- which currently include IBM, NEC, Novell,
Philips, Red Hat, and Sony -- agree to assign software patents that
might affect Linux to the OIN. These patents can then be used by anyone
in Linux without having to pay any royalty fees or having to worry
about future law suits. In late 2006, Oracle began offering its own
"Unbreakable Linux" distribution, a Red Hat Linux clone. Since the OIN
was founded in November 2005, the organization has accumulated more
than 100 strategic, worldwide patents and patent applications, it says.
These patents are available to all licensees as part of the patent
commons that OIN is creating around, and in support of, Linux. According
to the OIN, this patent commons makes it economically attractive for
companies that want to repackage, embed, and use Linux to host
specialized services or create complementary products. Patent cross-
licensing agreements aren't new. Oracle appearing to grant an
automatic patent license to any Linux developer that agrees to abide
by OIN's rules, however, is new.

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS3296732522.html
See also the announcement: http://xml.coverpages.org/Oracle-OIN.html

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OASIS Approves New Web Services Security Standards
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems
(OASIS) has announced that its members have approved
WS-SecureConversation version 1.3 and WS-Trust version 1.3 as OASIS
Standards. The specifications were developed by the OASIS WS-SX (Web
Services Secure Exchange) Technical Committee, and they define policies
and extensions to WS-Security that enable the trusted exchange of
multiple SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) messages. WS-Trust
provides methods for issuing, renewing and validating security tokens
as well as establishing, detecting and brokering trust relationships,
OASIS officials said. Meanwhile, WS-SecureConversation allows security
contexts to be created and key material to be exchanged more efficiently,
OASIS said. Together the standards can improve the performance and
security of exchanges. Anne Thomas Manes, research director with the
Burton Group: "In order to secure communication between two parties,
both must exchange security credentials. Before that can take place
though, each party needs to determine if they can 'trust' the asserted
credentials of the other. Applications that communicate using the Web
services framework (e.g., SOAP and WSDL) can use WS-Trust to obtain
and exchange security credentials -- either directly or through a
trusted third party -- and use WS-SecureConversation to establish and
maintain an extended secure session." IBM, Microsoft, and Sun
Microsystems have verified successful implementations of
WS-SecureConversation and WS-Trust, in accordance with eligibility
requirements for all OASIS Standards. Representatives of Adobe,
AmberPoint, Axway, BEA Systems, BMC Software, CA, EDS, Forum Systems,
Fujitsu, HP, IBM, IONA, Microsoft, Neustar, Nokia, Nortel, Novell,
Oracle, Progress Software, Red Hat, Ricoh, SAP, SOA Software, Software
AG, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO Software, VeriSign, and other members of
OASIS collaborated to develop WS-SecureConversation and WS-Trust.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2108444,00.asp
See also the announcement: http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis-news-2007-03-27.php

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Last Call Review for Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 2.0
David Booth, Canyang Kevin Liu (et al., eds), W3C Technical Reports

W3C's Web Services Description Working Group has released three Last
Call Working Drafts for the Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
Version 2.0. "Part 0: Primer" serves as a companion to the WSDL 2.0
specification: "Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0
Part 1: Core Language" and Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
Version 2.0 Part 2: Adjuncts. Comments are welcome through 15-April-2007
on this brief Last Call for changes since Candidate Recommendation
review. WSDL 2.0 provides a model and an XML format for describing
Web services. WSDL 2.0 enables one to separate the description of the
abstract functionality offered by a service from concrete details of
a service description such as how and where that functionality is
offered. The specification defines a language for describing the
abstract functionality of a service as well as a framework for
describing the concrete details of a service description. It also
defines the conformance criteria for documents in this language. In
Part 1 Core, the namespace of the language specified in the document,
and identifiers within it, have changed to a shorter, undated form:
"http://www.w3.org/ns/wsdl", "http://www.w3.org/ns/wsdl-instance",
"http://www.w3.org/ns/wsdl-extensions". "Part 2: Adjuncts" specifies
predefined extensions for use in WSDL 2.0, including Message exchange
patterns, Operation safety, Operation styles, and Binding extensions
for SOAP and HTTP. "WSDL RDF Mapping" has been issued in updated
Working Draft format: it provides a model and an XML format for
describing Web services, and describes a representation of that model
in the Resource Description Language (RDF) and in the Web Ontology
Language (OWL), and a mapping procedure for transforming particular
WSDL descriptions into their RDF form. "SOAP 1.1 Binding" has also
been updated.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-wsdl20-20070326/
See also the W3C news item: http://www.w3.org/News/2007#item53

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ODF Group A Year Old, But Format Still Unproven
Elizabeth Montalbano, InfoWorld

Tuesday marks the one-year anniversary of the ODF Alliance, an
international group of organizations dedicated to promoting ODF
(Open Document format for XML) as an international standard for
document formats. But while the group has encouraged public agencies
across the world to enact policies to support open IT standards over
the last year, ODF supporters have more work to do to increase the
adoption of alternatives to Microsoft's Office suite, industry watchers
said. In the past year, the alliance -- which counts IBM and Sun as
members -- has helped ODF gain momentum in government agencies across
the world and even in the U.S., which has been traditionally resistant
to replacing Microsoft software with open alternatives. The latest win
for the technology was on Tuesday when Oregon legislators joined
government officials in Texas, California, and Minnesota in proposing
bills that would make it mandatory for the state's government agencies
to base their technologies on open standards like ODF. Also in the past
year, the national governments of Belgium, Brazil, Croatia, Denmark,
France, Germany, and Norway have recommended ODF or open standards for
government documents like legislation and policy statements, and
several regional governments have also said they are eyeing the
standard for use as the default file format for documents, said
Marino Marcich, the ODF Alliance's executive director. While the
alliance has been a strong promoter of ODF and thus a catalyst for
much of this support, another event has paved the way for broader
adoption of ODF: its approval last May as an international standard
by the International Organization for Standardization. Microsoft's
rival Open XML format -- the default in Office 2007 -- is currently
awaiting standardization from the same group. The ODF Alliance, which
had 36 member organizations at its launch, now includes more than
370 members from 51 countries.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/27/HNodfoneyear_1.html
See also ODF references: http://xml.coverpages.org/odf.html

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Using Axis2 and JiBX: Turn XML Into a Fully Functional Web Service
Tyler Anderson, IBM developerWorks

Apache Axis2 provides several XML solutions to make Web services
development easier and more powerful. Axis2 is an excellent choice
for implementing Web services, and the Apache Axis2 and Apache
Geronimo duo, both free and open source, make them a viable option
to consider. This article, the second part in a series, uses Axis2
and JiBX to go from XML to a fully functional Web service from
existing Java classes. The previous part of this series introduced
the Java classes used to expose the classes as Web services through
WSDL, and then made a JiBX definition description that communicate
with the JiBX data bindings in order to test a Web service. In this
test process, you compile the JiBX binding classes to create wrapper
classes, making your data bindings classes a functional part of the
overall Web service.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-jibx2/
See also Part 1: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-jibx1/

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BEA Delivers Web 2.0 Enteprise Tools
By Richard Karpinski, Network Computing

BEA has unveiled three products aimed at helping IT create and deliver
enterprise-scale Web 2.0 and social-computing applications behind the
corporate firewall. The three products -- BEA AquaLogic Pages, BEA
AquaLogic Ensemble and BEA AquaLogic Pathways -- let companies produce
social applications while giving IT full control to manage end-user
participation and access to corporate data, BEA said. Social computing
and Web 2.0 is all the rage these days, but enterprises must weigh
the value of increased interaction against the need to secure
enterprise data and applications. BEA's AquaLogic Ensemble (formerly
called Project Runner) is infrastructure software for developers and
IT operations that lets them make and manage enterprise mash-up
applications. Mash-ups take data from various sources, both public
and behind-the-firewall, and bring them together to create new
applications. AquaLogic Pages (formerly Project Builder) is designed
to let end users access and expose enterprise data and create simple
Web applications for day-to-day business use. AquaLogic Pathways
(formerly Project Graffiti) is a collaboration tool that combines
social book-marking and tagging with search and activity analytics.
It is designed to help users within an enterprise discover relevant
information -- and to help others discover it as well.

http://www.networkcomputing.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198700556
See also the announcement: http://www.bea.com/news_events/press_releases/2007

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O'Reilly Book Notice: Schematron
Eric van der Vlist

Schematron is a rule-based XML schema language, offering flexibility
and power that W3C XML schema, RELAX NG, and DTDs simply can't match.
You need Schematron and can't settle for other languages if you have
to check rules that go beyond checking the document structures (i.e.,
checking that an element bar is included in element foo) and their
datatypes. Schematron is the right tool for checking conditions such
as "startDate is earlier than or equal to endDate." Schematron is also
the right tool to use if you have to raise user-friendly error
messages rather than depend on error messages that are generated by a
schema processor and that are often obscure. Schematron builds on
XPath. You will need to understand XPath to to get the most from
Schematron.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596527716/
See also Schematron references: http://xml.coverpages.org/schematron.html

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XML Daily Newslink and Cover Pages are sponsored by:

BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com
Primeton http://www.primeton.com
SAP AG http://www.sap.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

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XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 27 March 2007