Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 14 November 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
EDS http://www.eds.com
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HEADLINES:

* Mobile Web Leaders Push for Open Standards
* Ajax-based Persistent Object Mapping
* Associating Resources with Namespaces
* Search Web Services Version 1.0
* iPhone Gets Add-On Boost from Transmedia's Glide Mobile
* SEC Readies XBRL Tagging Rules for Financial Filings
* Data Binding With Castor, Part 1
* Nortel Launches SOA Initiative

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Mobile Web Leaders Push for Open Standards
Matt Hines, InfoWorld

The technological barriers and business models that have led to the
current morass of proprietary handheld devices, closed-off carrier
networks, and specialized wireless applications must be eliminated if
the mobile Internet is to become as powerful and ubiquitous as it should
someday be, according to industry leaders. Content providers,
applications developers, and mobile carriers, along with standards
backers like Tim Berners-Lee -- the so-called father of the World
Wide Web -- stumped for greater openness in the platforms being used
to develop future wireless online systems at the ongoing Mobile Internet
World conference in Boston on Wednesday. While the lion's share today's
of mobile Web applications do not work across multiple devices, wireless
service plans, and software environments, the potential of the mobile
Internet will only be realized when providers across the industry shift
from proprietary systems to open standards, experts presenting at the
conference said. Representatives from carrier Sprint Nextel, phone maker
Nokia, applications vendor Opera, and even content producer MTV pledged
their commitments at the conference to embrace the call of industry
leaders like Berners-Lee to move away from the proprietary systems they
have previously fostered and to adopt more standards-based platforms.
Berners-Lee said that his invention of the World Wide Web would have
never had the same unilateral influence and adoption that it has enjoyed
if it had been created only to work on a certain type of device or
operating system.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/11/14/Mobile-Web-leaders-push-for-open-standards_1.html
See also ComputerWorld: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9046899

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Ajax-based Persistent Object Mapping
Kristopher William Zyp, IBM developerWorks

Virtually all applications use some form of persistence; that is, they
save information for future execution. Generally, the ability to persist
information for later retrieval is a critical aspect of applications,
and as Web applications increasingly integrate user interaction and
contribution, persistence becomes more important. However, persistence
often requires saving state information in a way that's conceptually
different from how the data exists in the execution of the program.
Within the execution of a program, state information is typically stored
in objects (at least, in object-oriented programs) but persisted either
into databases or into text- or character-based formats. The
transformation of state information back and forth between these two
paradigms can often require significant development work and is highly
susceptible to errors. Persistent object-mapping strategies can provide
automation for state storage and retrieval by mapping objects to
persistent data. Such mapping can also provide a simple mechanism for
accessing persistent state and saving that state. The Persevere persistent
object framework brings persistent object mapping to the browser
JavaScript environment. Object persistence has seen great popularity in
the Java programming and Ruby worlds, and the dynamic JavaScript language
is naturally well suited to mapping objects to persisted data. Persevere
automates mapping and communication in Asynchronous JavaScript + XML
(Ajax)-based Web applications in addition to simplifying much of the
development challenge by providing a manageable data model, transparent
client-server Ajax interchanges, automatic state change storage, and
implicit transaction management. By using orthogonal persistent object
mapping, you can rapidly develop powerful Ajax applications by using
simple, familiar JavaScript code. The complexity of writing Ajax requests,
serialization, and database interaction can easily be handled by
Persevere to provide object-oriented access to persisted data for rapid
application development.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/wa-aj-objmap/
See the Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/persevere-framework/

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Associating Resources with Namespaces
Norman Walsh and Henry S. Thompson (eds), W3C Draft TAG Finding

The editors of the document "Associating Resources with Namespaces"
have released an updated editors' draft. This TAG finding addresses
the question of how ancillary information (schemas, stylesheets,
documentation, etc.) can be associated with a namespace. Section 4
"Namespace URIs and Namespace Documents" (earlier section title was:
"Identifying Individual Terms") has been expanded to include: 4.1
"Namespace URIs and Namespace Documents: The XML language case"; 4.2
"Namespace URIs and Namespace Documents: The Semantic Web case"; 4.3
"GRDDL and Namespace documents." From the Preface: The names in a
namespace form a collection: (1) Sometimes it is a collection of
element names -- DocBook and XHTML, for example; (2) sometimes it
is a collection of attribute names -- XLink, for example; (3)
sometimes it is a collection of functions -- XQuery 1.0 and XPath
2.0 Data Model; (4) sometimes it is a collection of properties --
FOAF; (5) sometimes it is a collection of concepts (WordNet), and
many other uses are likely to arise. Given the wide variety of things
that can be identified, it follows that an equally wide variety of
ancillary resources may be relevant to a namespace. A namespace may
have documentation (specifications, reference material, tutorials,
etc., perhaps in several formats and several languages), schemas
(in any of several forms), stylesheets, software libraries, applications,
or any other kind of related resource. The names in a namespace
likewise may have a range of information associated with them...
[In this document] we define a conceptual model for identifying related
resources that is simple enough to garner community consensus as a
reasonable abstraction for the problem; we show how RDDL 1.0 is one
possible concrete syntax for this model; and we show how other
concrete syntaxes could be defined and identified in a way that
would preserve the model.

http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/nsDocuments-2007-11-13/
See also the color-coded diff version: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/nsDocuments-2007-11-13/diff_20071005.html

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Search Web Services Version 1.0
Ray Denenberg and Matthew Dovey (TC Chairs), Discussion Document

OASIS announced a 30-day review for a TC Discussion document titled
"Search Web Services Version 1.0," produced by members of the OASIS
Search Web Services Technical Committee. This document was prepared
as a strawman proposal for public review, intended to generate
discussion and interest. It has no official status. Summary: "The
Search web service is a means of opening a database to external enquiry
in a standardized manner that facilitates discovery of query and
response possibilities and makes it possible for heterogeneous
databases to be queried simultaneously with the same or similar queries.
Client software can be easily configured using a standardized XML
explain document that is accessible from the base URL or via the
explain operation. In contrast with protocols such as SQL and XQuery,
detailed knowledge of a database's structure is not necessary as the
explain document contains parsable information on server defaults,
searchable indexes and record schemas that are returned in the response."
The new specification itself is based on the SRU (Search Retrieve via
URL) specification which can be found at the U.S. Library of Congress
web site. SRU is a standard XML-focused search protocol for Internet
search queries, utilizing CQL (Contextual Query Language), a standard
syntax for representing queries. It is expected that the OASIS standard,
when published, will deviate from SRU. How much it will deviate cannot
be predicted at this time. The fact that the SRU spec is used as a
starting point for development should not be cause for concern that
this might be an effort to rubberstamp or fasttrack SRU. The committee
hopes to preserve the useful features of SRU, eliminate those that are
not considered useful, and add features that are not in SRU but are
considered useful. The committee has decided to request OASIS to release
this as a discussion document. Detailed review of this document is
premature at this point and is not requested; feedback on the
functionality and approach is solicited. Please send comments by
December 7, 2007.

http://docs.oasis-open.org/search-ws/v1.0/DiscussionDocument.html
See also the announcement: http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/200711/msg00003.html

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iPhone Gets Add-On Boost from Transmedia's Glide Mobile
Elena Malykhina, InformationWeek

Just in time for the iPhone release in the U.K. and Germany on Friday,
online media management and collaboration provider Transmedia launched
an application for creating Word Documents, Web sites, and PDFs on the
popular device. Transmedia's Glide Mobile is a Web-based AJAX and HTML
application that can be accessed through the iPhone's Safari browser.
Once a person signs up for a Glide Mobile account, they can create,
access, and editMicrosoft Word or Open Office documents on their iPhone
-- an option that doesn't come pre-installed on the device. Subscribers
can use many of the same features they're used to on the desktop, such
as bolding, italicizing, or underlining text, as well as creating bullet
points. Documents created on the iPhone can also be converted to PDF
files. The application automatically syncs up and converts desktop
Microsoft Word documents for access on the iPhone. But an Internet
connection is required so that Glide Mobile can send a signal to
Transmedia's servers to trigger the automatic synching. Glide Mobile
can also be used to create media rich documents on the iPhone, since
it offers the option of inserting photos, music, video, bookmarks,
calendar events, and more. Window Media Player videos exported from
Windows-based PCs are converted to QuickTime through Glide Mobile,
making them viewable on the iPhone.

http://www.informationweek.com/internet/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202804346

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SEC Readies XBRL Tagging Rules for Financial Filings
Roy Mark, eWEEK

U.S. businesses could be required to file financial reports formatted
in XBRL, top Securities and Exchange Commission officials said November
13, 2007. John White, head of the SEC's division of corporate finance,
and Conrad Hewitt, the SEC's chief accountant, told the Financial
Executives International Conference in New York that the SEC is in the
process of shaping an XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language)
proposal to make it mandatory in required filings. The SEC currently
has a voluntary program for tagging financial documents with XBRL.
Microsoft, General Electric and United Technologies are already
participating in the program. A member of the XML family, XBRL is a
machine-readable language for business and financial data. Instead of
treating financial information as a block of text -- as in a standard
Internet page or a printed document -- it provides an identifying tag
for each individual item of data. The open-source, royalty-free language
is being developed by an international non-profit consortium of
approximately 450 major companies, organizations and government agencies.
Of the countries attending the conference, China is moving fastest on
XBRL, already requiring interactive data filing for the full financial
statements of all listed companies in quarterly, half-year and annual
reports. Japan has mandated XBRL for all public companies by the end
of the second quarter of next year. Korea has instituted a voluntary
XBRL program that began last month. Almost 30 companies are already
filing their full financial information using XBRL.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2217203,00.asp

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Data Binding With Castor, Part 1
Brett D. McLaughlin, IBM developerWorks

The Castor project provides data binding capabilities to the open source
realm. It works much like Sun's JAXB, and adds enhanced mapping and
binding to relational database tables. This article shows how to take
the first steps to get Castor to run on your own machine with downloading,
installation, setup, configuration, class path issues, and more. Castor
is an almost-drop-in replacement for JAXB. In other words, you can change
all of your JAXB code to Castor with very little trouble. It's not an
exact replacement, but it's close enough to make the task simple for
even newbie programmers. Castor offers quite a bit more in the data
binding area, allows you to convert between Java and XML without a schema,
an easier-to-use binding schema than JAXB, and the ability to marshal and
unmarshal from a relational database, as well as XML documents. Castor
also provides JDO capabilities. JDO stands for Java Data Objects, and
it's the underlying technology that drives the Java-to-RDBMS marshalling
and unmarshalling. JDO isn't quite as popular as it was a few years ago,
but it's still a nice feature to have. Additionally, because JDO is
another Sun specification, you won't write code to an obscure API.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xjavacastor1/
See also the Castor Project web site: http://www.castor.org/

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Nortel Launches SOA Initiative
Paula Musich, eWEEK

Nortel Networks is launching its first foray into SOA-based
communications as it takes the wraps off its Raptor project November
14, 2007 and announces an alliance with partner IBM. Nortel's strategy
leverages service-oriented architecture and Web services technology to
enable both enterprises and carriers to quickly integrate communications
and business processes. Nortel's overall Communications Enablement
strategy is based on four pillars: the implementation of Web services
on specific products; its new software development foundation that
speeds the integration of communications functions into applications
and business processes; alliances with multiple partners, starting with
IBM; and the formation of a Nortel global services practice to support
the SOA-based applications and services. Raptor is a tool kit that
allows developers to more easily integrate functions such as click-to-call,
presence, location and context into applications and business processes.
Developers don't have to know the details of the underlying communications
technology that delivers the connectivity. The Raptor foundation will
not only leverage IBM's WebSphere middleware, but also be integrated
with IBM's Lotus Sametime communications and collaboration platform.
Integration with Sametime will allow functions such as click-to-call,
click-to-conference, presence and shared directory services to be added
quickly. For example, a Sametime user could, from within the Sametime
client, see if a contact's phone is in use.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2216920,00.asp
See also ADT Magazine: http://www.adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=21597

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XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 14 November 2007