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XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 21 June 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
Primeton http://www.primeton.com

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HEADLINES:

* WS-ReliableMessaging Version 1.1 Approved as an OASIS Standard
* IBM Uncoils Viper 2 Beta
* Canonical XML 1.1 Becomes a W3C Candidate Recommendation
* Ecma Evolves JavaScript for Objects
* Getting Productive with the XMLMind XML Editor
* The Concordia Project and XML Security Interoperability
* Backlash Against IP Protection Deals Heating Up

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WS-ReliableMessaging Version 1.1 Approved as an OASIS Standard
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS announced that its members have approved Web Services Reliable
Messaging (WS-ReliableMessaging) version 1.1 as an OASIS Standard.
WS-ReliableMessaging allows messages to be transferred reliably despite
failures in software components, systems, or networks. It enables a
broad range of reliability features, including ordered delivery,
duplicate elimination, and guaranteed receipt. Paul Fremantle of WSO2,
co-chair of the OASIS Web Services Reliable Exchange (WS-RX) Technical
Committee: "Reliable messaging is one of the features customers demand
most as they move to electronic business. The problem is that messages
can be lost, repeated, or reordered, and host systems can fail.
WS-ReliableMessaging addresses all these risks by providing a modular
mechanism that identifies, tracks, and manages the reliable transfer of
messages between a source and a destination." Sanjay Patil of SAP,
co-chair of the OASIS WS-RX Technical Committee: "WS-ReliableMessaging
delivers a key element in the openness of an enterprise service-oriented
architecture (SOA) and provides a critical building block that can be
used in conjunction with other specifications and application-specific
protocols to reliably handle a wide variety of SOA requirements and
scenarios." The extensible nature of WS-ReliableMessaging allows
additional functionality, such as security, to be tightly integrated.
It incorporates a SOAP binding for interoperability and allows
additional bindings to be defined. The protocol can be implemented
with a variety of robustness characteristics ranging from in-memory
persistence scoped to a single process lifetime, to replicated durable
storage that is recoverable in the most extreme circumstances. The
WS-ReliableMessaging OASIS Standard was developed by representatives
of Adobe, BEA Systems, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, IONA, Microsoft,
NEC, Nortel, Novell, Oracle, Progress Software, Red Hat, SAP, Sun
Microsystems, TIBCO, webMethods, and others.

http://xml.coverpages.org/WS-ReliableMessaging-OS.html
See also Reliable Messaging references: http://xml.coverpages.org/reliableMessaging.html

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IBM Uncoils Viper 2 Beta
Brian Prince, eWEEK

IBM has released to the public a beta version of DB2 Viper 2, the
newest incarnation of its data server. IBM is promising Viper 2 will
expand on its predecessor by simplifying the development and
administration of XML in DB2 with features such as a built-in SQL
function that allows users to transform XML documents using an XML
style sheet. Other enhancements include better integration of workload
management functionality into the database engine and automated backup
maintenance. DB2 Viper 2 builds on the flexibility and power of pureXML
by simplifying both development and the administration of XML in DB2.
DB2 Viper 2 now integrates workload management functionality into the
database engine. This new technology allows DBAs to have full control
over how and which workloads run in their databases and manage them
based on the needs of the business. From the description 'Highlights of
the DB2 Viper 2 Release': (1) Increased integration between relational
and XML functionality allowing for easy development and XML publishing
of relational data; (2) Greater knowledge and control of your systems
with integrated workload management; (3) Hand's off fail over with
automated and easy to use high availability; (4) Greater flexibility
and granularity in security, auditing and access control; (5) Simplified
memory management and increased customization capabilities.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2148829,00.asp
See also DB2 Viper 2 Open Beta Program: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/9/openbeta.html

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Canonical XML 1.1 Becomes a W3C Candidate Recommendation
John Boyer and Glenn Marcy (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of "Canonical XML 1.1" to
Candidate Recommendation. Comments on this document are due by
30-September-2007, but earlier comments are expressly solicited. The
XML Core Working Group will advance the specification to Proposed
Recommendation when the following exit criteria have been met: (1)
Test documents must have been developed with a range of usages of
attributes in the XML namespace, and correct and compatible results
shown for these tests by at least two implementations; (2) A minimum
of three months of the CR period must have elapsed. The canonical XML
method is used to determine whether an application has changed a
document and whether two XML documents are identical, allowing for
low-level changes in syntax permitted by XML 1.0. The XML 1.0
Recommendation specifies the syntax of a class of resources called
XML documents and "Namespaces in XML Recommendation" specifies
additional syntax and semantics for XML documents. It is possible for
XML documents which are equivalent for the purposes of many applications
to differ in physical representation. For example, they may differ in
their entity structure, attribute ordering, and character encoding
When the canonical forms are identical the originals are logically
equivalent within the application's context. Version 1.1 addresses
inheritance of attributes when canonicalizing document subsets, to
not inherit xml:id, and to treat xml:base URI path processing properly.
The term canonical XML refers to XML that is in canonical form. The
XML canonicalization method is the algorithm defined by this
specification that generates the canonical form of a given XML document
or document subset. The term XML canonicalization refers to the
process of applying the XML canonicalization method to an XML document
or document subset.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/CR-xml-c14n11-20070621/
See also the W3C news item: http://www.w3.org/News/2007#item131

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Ecma Evolves JavaScript for Objects
Alex Handy, SD Times

After 12 years, JavaScript is making the jump to 2.0, and a lot has
changed since this language was first released in December 1995, in a
beta of the Netscape 2.0 browser. In the meantime, Microsoft swamped
the browser market, Ecma International standardized JavaScript, and XML
became a reality. JavaScript has slowly grown to become the most
important language for Web developers, thanks to the copy-and-paste
nature of Web code, and the popularity of mixing Asynchronous JavaScript
and XML, also known as AJAX. Over the next few months, the language will
be evolving into a more object-oriented form, if its creator [Brendan
Eich] gets his way. ECMAScript is the Ecma standard version of JavaScript,
and it has been slowly moving toward version 2.0 over the past couple of
years. For all intents and purposes, ECMAScript and JavaScript are soon
to become one and the same, as Eich hopes that version 2.0 will be the
standard upon which all other implementations are based. Eich noted that
Microsoft and Adobe Systems have both produced implementations of this
as-yet unfinished language, Microsoft's JScript .NET and Adobe's Flash
ActionScript. He said he hopes that ECMAScript 2.0 will spur browser
makers to adhere to that standard, rather than create their own specific
versions of the language. The ES-lang.org site went live in mid-May,
and offers developers the chance to play with ECMAScript 2.0. Eich
expects more content in June, including bug tracking and links to
reference implementations.

http://www.sdtimes.com/article/story-20070615-02.html
See also the reference implementation web site: http://es-lang.org/

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Getting Productive with the XMLMind XML Editor
James Elliott and Marc Loy

What do you use when you need to edit large technical documents with
complex structure and cross-references? Presentation-focused editors
like Word are completely inadequate to this kind of task. For some
time, things looked increasingly desperate. We hung on, running old
FrameMaker versions in Apple's Classic OS emulation mode (which works
only on older PowerPC hardware). Happily, an alternative has emerged
based on the DocBook XML format, an open standard for representing
technical documentation. There is a growing tool chain for this format,
with a family of editors and processors that can format output as HTML
or for print. One editor stands out from the pack. The XMLmind XML
Editor (XXE for short) is a great general-purpose XML editor, but has
surprisingly powerful support for working with DocBook materials in an
author-friendly way. We were introduced to it by the Tools group at
O'Reilly, and once we got the hang of it, started feeling hopeful and
enthusiastic about the future of technical writing software again.
While it's not perfect, it's a lot better than we expected, and seems
to be growing fast. Like any powerful tool, of course, there are some
details and techniques that you need to learn before you feel
proficient and can focus on your actual goals rather than figuring out
how to wield the tool in a way that helps rather than hindering. This
article tries to leverage our own learning struggles to make your own
learning process faster and more pleasant. So if you decide to adopt
XMLmind for your technical writing -- and we certainly hope you do --
here are some pointers that should help... [Note: "XMLmind XML Editor
allows to edit large, complex, modular, XML documents. It makes it
easy mastering XML vocabularies such as DocBook or DITA. XMLmind XML
Editor is not a tool for programmers: its users are generally technical
writers.]

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/06/20/getting-productive-with-xmlmind.html
See also XMLmind XML Editor: http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/

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The Concordia Project and XML Security Interoperability
Ed Tittel, SearchWebServices.com

Those already familiar with XML security standards, especially those
that relate to identity presentation and management, also know that this
is a fragmented landscape, populated with multiple, formerly unrelated
and not always compatible, schemes. Simply put, the Concordia Project
seeks to make some order from this chaos, and to define mechanisms
whereby various competing or incompatible identity schemes can seek what
the groups goals describe as "harmonization and interoperability of
identity specifications and protocols." This already sounds pretty good,
but when you look at the group's purpose, principles, and charter, you
find specific mention of the following existing or emerging standards:
(1) CardSpace, Microsoft's .NET initiative for identity presentation
and management; (2) Liberty Alliance Project, an open initiative that
aims to establish a similarly open standard for federated network
identity; (3) OpenID, an open and decentralized identity system designed
"not to crumble if one company turns evil or goes out of business"; (4)
openLiberty.org, an organization "established to provide easy access to
tools and information to jumpstart the development of more secure and
privacy-respecting identity-based applications based on Liberty
Federation and Liberty Web Services standards"; (5) Open Source, a
general movement for creating open, royalty-free, publicly accessible
information processing standards and software; (6) SAML (Security
Assertion Markup Language), initiative underway at OASIS, seeks to
define and maintain a standard, XML-based framework for creating and
exchanging security information, including identity, between online
partners; (7) WS-Federation, a member of the Web Services family of
XML specifications, is spearheaded by IBM and seeks to define
"mechanisms to allow different security realms to federate by allowing
and brokering trust of identities, attributes [and] authentication
between participating Web services." This working group, organized
on April 24, 2007, wants to unite these and other standards and to
help foster development of one ubiquitous, interoperable, privacy-
respecting layer that all developers and Web site operators can share.

http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid26_gci1261541,00.html
See also the Concordia Project: http://projectconcordia.org/

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Backlash Against IP Protection Deals Heating Up
Keith Ward, Application Development Trends

For the past several weeks, there has been a rush among some Linux
vendors to ink patent protection deals with Microsoft. But that may
have spurred a backlash, as other Linux companies are asserting their
independence by refusing to go along with what they see as knuckling
under to Microsoft's legal threats. The latest to state its
independence is Paris-based Mandriva (formerly Mandrakesoft), which
makes a desktop Linux distribution called Mandriva Linux. In a blog
entry, CEO *** Bancilhon made his company's position clear:
"We don't believe it is necessary for us to get protection from
Microsoft to do our job or to pay protection money to anyone."
Mandriva's announcement followed closely on the heels of a similar
announcement from Ubuntu Linux developer Mark Shuttleworth, who wrote
that "A promise by Microsoft not to sue for infringement of unspecified
patents has no value at all and is not worth paying for." Those
companies have joined Red Hat Linux, the largest Linux company in the
industry, which provided the following statement on its Web site:
"An innovation tax is unthinkable. Free and open source software
provide the necessary environment for true innovation. Innovation
without fear or threat. Activities that isolate communities or limit
upstream adoption will inevitably stifle innovation."

http://www.adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=20849

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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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