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XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 10 July 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:

* Emotion Markup Language: W3C Incubator Group Report Final Report
* WSO2 Mashup Server Version 0.1 Released
* Icesoft Improves AJAX Environment for Web 2.0 Applications
* XML Merging Made Easy: Manipulate XML Files Using XPath Declarations
* Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema
* Ballmer Urges Partners to Embrace SAAS
* Use XForms and Ajax to Create An Autosuggest Form Field
* Atomojo Atom Publish Protocol Server 0.4.0 Release Available
* Java EE 6 Is Back and on Track

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Emotion Markup Language: W3C Incubator Group Report Final Report
Marc Schroeder, Enrico Zovato, Hannes Pirker (et al, eds), W3C Report

W3C announced that the Emotion Incubator Group, which includes
representatives from sixteen institutions in eleven countries on three
continents, has published its final report. The Report presents
requirements for information that needs to be represented in a
general-purpose Emotion Markup Language in order to be usable in a
wide range of use cases. Specifically, the report describes the range
of use cases in which an emotion markup language would be needed, and
presents a rich structured collection of requirements arising from
those use cases. It describes how the requirements coincide with
scientific models of emotion, and begins to assess syntactic issues
in view of a future specification, by evaluating existing markup
languages in the light of the collected requirements. The report
identifies various areas which require further investigation and debate.
The intention is that it forms a major input into a new Incubator
Group which would develop a draft specification as a proposal towards
a future activity in the W3C Recommendation Track.

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion/XGR-emotion-20070710/
See also the W3C Emotion Incubator Group: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion/

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WSO2 Mashup Server Version 0.1 Released
Jonathan Marsh, Blog

Today we released our first alpha version of the WSO2 Mashup Server.
The capabilities are quite limited at present but the fundamentals are
in place to deliver an innovative product. The primary issue we're
trying to solve is that of Web Service composition. There are a number
of specifications such as BPEL and WS-Choreography which target this
space, but they are fairly heavyweight and difficult while still being
limited in their capabilities. Rather than these more formal
orchestration methods, we've approached the problems of service
composition from another direction, inspired by the Web 2.0 phenomenon
of mashups. Mashups are light and quick compositions of information
from various sources - usually a mix of individual information with
global information -- my pictures appearing on a map is the archetype
of these kinds of mashups. As Web 2.0 technologies erode the boundaries
of the enterprise, we feel that mashups and service compositions will
converge into the same space. So what we've done is fairly simple, yet
also pretty unique: (1) Provide a platform for easy invocation of Web
Services from within a JavaScript + E4X environment. This enables you
to grab data in XML format from a variety of Web Services and manipulate
it fluidly. (2) Expose JavaScript functions as Web Service operations,
complete with WSDL 2.0 or WSDL 1.1 and XML Schema descriptions, and
automatically generate bindings for SOAP 1.2, SOAP 1.1, and REST access.
There you have the basic service composition capability: acquire data,
manipulate it, and expose it again as a new Web Service. The ability
to recursively expose mashups and allow them in turn to be mashed up
is But wait there's more!....

http://auburnmarshes.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!F985A6952BC07C4!691.entry
See also the WSO2 Mashup Server: http://wso2.org/projects/mashup

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Icesoft Improves AJAX Environment for Web 2.0 Applications
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Icesoft Technologies has announced availability of Icefaces 1.6.0, an
upgrade to the company's AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)
development environment positioned for building of Web 2.0 applications.
Featured in the open-source product is integration with the JBoss Seam
1.2 development framework for Java. Icesoft describes Seam as a
framework for Web 2.0 application development with Web 2.0 characterized
as enabling collaboration. Icefaces is based on JSF (JavaServer Faces)
but features AJAX. Developers use JSF components and get interactivity
based on AJAX. In addition to supporting AJAX, Seam leverages JSF,
Enterprise JavaBeans, Java Portlets and business process management.
With Seam, developers can assemble Web applications with annotated
Plain Old Java Objects, componentized UI widgets, and little XML.
Icefaces 1.6.0 also features source code examples, such as the Icefaces
+ Seam Component Showcase that illustrates an Icefaces component suite
functioning within a Seam-based application. Compliance with the
OpenAjax Hub in Icefaces provides interoperability between JavaScript
libraries. An AJAX bridge in version 1.6.0 prevents security violations
based on cross-site request forgery exploits. Other improvements include
support for the Glassfish, SAP NetWeaver 2007, and Webtide Jetty
application servers as well as integration with Spring Web Flow
technology and support for Apache MyFaces Tomahawk components.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/07/10/ice-soft_1.html
See also the Icesoft Technologies announcement: http://www.icesoft.com/newsletter/ICEfaces_1.6-Seam_Integration.html

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XML Merging Made Easy: Manipulate XML Files Using XPath Declarations
Laurent Bovet, JavaWorld Magazine

"As a Java developer you use XML every day in your build scripts,
deployment descriptors, configuration files, object-relational mapping
files and more. Creating all these XML files can be tedious, but it's
not especially challenging. Manipulating or merging the data contained
in such disparate files, however, can be difficult and time-consuming.
You might prefer to use several files split into different modules,
but find yourself limited to one large file because that is the only
format the XML's intended consumer can understand. In this article, I
present an open source tool I created to resolve many of the common
problems associated with merging and manipulating data from different
XML documents. EL4J XmlMerge is a Java library under the LGPL license
that makes it easier to merge elements from different XML sources.
While XmlMerge is part of the EL4J framework, you can use it
independently of EL4J. All you need to run the XmlMerge utility from
your command line is JDK 1.5 or greater. You will learn how to use
XmlMerge for a variety of common XML merging scenarios, including
merging two XML files, merging XML file data from different sources
to create a Spring Resource bean at runtime and combining XmlMerge
and Ant to create an automated deployment descriptor at build time.
I'll also show you how to use XPath declarations and built-in actions
and matchers to specify the treatment of specific elements during an
XML merge. I'll conclude with a look at XmlMerge's simple merging
algorithm and suggest ways it could be extended for more specialized
XML merging operations.

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-07-2007/jw-07-xmlmerge.html
See also the EL4J web site: http://el4j.sourceforge.net/

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Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema
Joel Farrell and Holger Lausen (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C announced that the specification for "Semantic Annotations for
WSDL and XML Schema" has been advanced to Proposed Recommendation.
Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL) "defines how
to add semantic annotations to various parts of a WSDL document such
as input and output message structures, interfaces and operations.
The extension attributes defined in this specification fit within the
WSDL 2.0, WSDL 1.1, and XML Schema extensibility frameworks. For
example, this specification defines a way to annotate WSDL interfaces
and operations with categorization information that can be used to
publish a Web service in a registry. The annotations on schema types
can be used during Web service discovery and composition. In addition,
SAWSDL defines an annotation mechanism for specifying the data mapping
of XML Schema types to and from an ontology; such mappings could be
used during invocation, particularly when mediation is required. To
accomplish semantic annotation, SAWSDL defines extension attributes
that can be applied both to WSDL elements and to XML Schema elements.
The semantic annotations reference a concept in an ontology or a
mapping document. The annotation mechanism is independent of the
ontology expression language and this specification requires and
enforces no particular ontology language. It is also independent of
mapping languages and does not restrict the possible choices of such
languages." Comments on the PR are welcome through 17-August-2007.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/PR-sawsdl-20070705/
See also the news item: http://www.w3.org/News/2007#item142

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Ballmer Urges Partners to Embrace SAAS
Peter Galli, eWEEK
July 10, 2007

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to attendees at the annual Worldwide Partner
Conference: "Microsoft and its partners must change the way they have
traditionally done business to accommodate software as a service."
Ballmer said that there is a new set of innovations that affects the
fundamental model of computation and the user interface, and that this
affects everyone, from customers to partners and developers. The future
of software and services will bring together the best of the desktop,
the enterprise, the Web and devices. The desktop will bring a rich user
experience, offline access and personal integration, while the enterprise
brings management, compliance and security, Web click-to-run, search,
and collaboration built-in; and devices bring mobility and new device
form factors... Ballmer said he is often asked about the future of user
experience and if the world will go to all thin clients and all HTML,
but "that is not right, I was going to say it's nonsense. Mobile devices
are getting richer, not smaller and thinner. We want all the benefits of
rich and enterprise and of our devices," he said, referencing the
company's Silverlight platform, which started the software-plus-services
transition. Developer services will involve Windows Live Cloud
infrastructure services and Silverlight streaming, as well as BizTalk
services. Service enablers for Web sites include Windows Server, SQL
Server, Visual Studio and AdCenter, while service enablers for click-
to-run clients are ActiveX, AJAX, Silverlight, .Net and Win32Softgrid...

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2156697,00.asp

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Use XForms and Ajax to Create An Autosuggest Form Field
Michael Galpin, IBM developerWorks

This article shows how XForms can be used to complement Ajax. It uses
many of the same paradigms as Ajax, but provides several simplifications
and optimizations. It's easier to send and receive data from the server
using XForms, and you get "smarter" events from it. It can also simplify
the JavaScript needed, providing a lot of "boilerplate" functionality
that JavaScript must implement normally. In conclusion, it's often
beneficial to let XForms be the "A" and the "X" in Ajax. An
autosuggest-form field is a prototypical Ajax feature. One of the
applications that first popularized it was Google Suggest. In Google
Suggest, you start typing a keyword to search on and the application
suggests search terms based on popularity. This is nice for users, as
they don't have to type all of their search term and it helps prevents
data-entry mistakes. This technique is used widely in Web applications
now. XForms is a standardized technology, but it is not yet implemented
by default in most browsers. This article uses the Mozilla XForms add-on.
This is an add-on that can be used with any Mozilla Gecko-based browsers
such as Firefox, Seamonkey, and Flock. All of the XForms code used
here is standard, so any compliant XForms implementations should be
similar, but it's been tested against the Mozilla XForms Add-on version
0.8 installed on Mozilla Firefox 2.0.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xformssuggest/
See also XML and Forms: http://xml.coverpages.org/xmlForms.html

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Atomojo Atom Publish Protocol Server 0.4.0 Release Available
Alex Milowski, XML-DEV Posting

"I've just put up a new version (0.4.0) of my atomojo Atom Publishing
Protocol (APP) server... this is the first release I think is stable
and ready to take a beating from you all! The feeds and xml content are
stored in an embedded version of eXist and they are also indexed in
several ways external to eXist. The most interesting new features are
the metadata and term feeds. Metadata feeds give you context information
about related feeds in the hierarchy (e.g. children, ancestors, etc.).
Term feeds enumerate feeds and entries by their use of the Atom category
element..." From the web site description: "The atomojo project contains
both an Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) server and client. While both are
intended to be used together, as they implement a standard protocol,
they can be used with other APP-enable applications. The client [Atomojo
Firefox Extension] is a Firefox plugin that contains an XPCOM component
for interacting with the Atom protocol... The Atomojo Server runs on
top of a restlet.org engine and uses a rest-style URI architecture for
its feeds. Feed are organized hierarchically just like a file system
but they are store in an XML database called eXist. In addition to eXist,
there is a metadata index that is stored in an embedded Derby database.
This index stores information about what feeds contain what entries as
well as information about categorization. Once the server is started,
you can get the service introspection document by a GET on the server
root... Supporting documents include a development Roadmap for future
directions, an Administration Guide for the server, a Users Guide for
the server, a specification of the pull synchronization process, and
a specification of the push synchronization process..."

http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200707/msg00022.html
See also the Google code: http://code.google.com/p/atomojo

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Java EE 6 Is Back and on Track
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

The Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 specification is back, and with
it will be a lot of flexibility for developers. The new Java EE 6
specification, which was released on July 3, 2007 is known as Java
Specification Request (JSR) 316. JSR 316 is aimed at reaching a wider
audience of developers. Rod Johnson, CEO of Interface21 Ltd. -- the
maintainers of the Spring Framework -- said, "I believe that this will
be the most important revision of the platform since it was released
nearly 10 years ago, and that it should be welcomed by users of the
technology." Indeed, according to the specification, in the past eight
years, the Java EE platform has grown and matured, and is now able to
cover a wide range of enterprise and Web application development needs.
In addition, the Java EE platform has fostered a vibrant community and
marketplace for additional technologies, frameworks and applications
that work with the platform, the JSR 316 specification said. Some of
these provide facilities that are missing from the platform. Others
provide alternatives to platform facilities. Meanwhile, to address the
issue of the increasing broadness of the Java EE platform, the backers
of JSR 316 have introduced the concept of profiles. These profiles
will reference the Java EE platform, as defined by the JCP process
and may include a subset of Java EE platform technologies, additional
JCP technologies not part of the base Java EE platform, or both. One
thing the Java EE 6 specification does not include is the OSGi
(Open Services Gateway Initiative). It simply says that work on modules
is being considered in JSR 277 the Java Module System, which is
targeted for Java Platform, Standard Edition 7 (Java SE 7).

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2155884,00.asp
See also JSR 316: http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=316

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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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