Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 04 December 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
SAP AG http://www.sap.com
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HEADLINES:

* W3C Issues XForms 1.1 Candidate Recommendation Call for Implementations
* All Interface Technologies by Market Dominators Should be QA-ed,
ZRAND Standards!
* Alfresco Aligns With Adobe
* No Searching for the Swicki: It's Here
* Extensible Markup Language (XML) Format Extension for Representing
Copy Control Attributes in Resource Lists
* New XBRL Taxonomy a 'Boon to Investors'
* Red Hat Announces Real-Time Additions to Linux
* Intel Launches XML Suite Aimed at Enterprise SOA

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W3C Issues XForms 1.1 Candidate Recommendation Call for Implementations
John M. Boyer (ed), W3C Technical Report

W3C announced that the Forms Working Group has published the Candidate
Recommendation of XForms 1.1. XForms is an XML application that
represents the next generation of forms for the Web. An XForms-based
Web form gathers and processes XML data using an architecture that
separates presentation, purpose and content. XForms is not a free-standing
document type, but is intended to be integrated into other markup
languages, such as XHTML, ODF, or SVG. XForms 1.1 refines the XML
processing platform introduced in XForms 1.0 by adding several new
submission capabilities, action handlers, utility functions, user
interface improvements, and helpful datatypes as well as a more powerful
action processing facility, including conditional, iterated and
background execution, the ability to manipulate data arbitrarily and
to access event context information. XForms accommodates form component
reuse, fosters strong data type validation, eliminates unnecessary
round-trips to the server, offers device independence and reduces the
need for scripting. W3C publishes a Candidate Recommendation to indicate
that the document is believed to be stable and to encourage implementation
by the developer community. The W3C Forms Working Group expects to
request that the Director advance this document to Proposed Recommendation
once the Working Group has provided a test suite and an implementation
report to demonstrate at least two interoperable implementations for
each test of a required feature and at least one implementation for
each test of a feature. The working group does not plan to request to
advance to Proposed Recommendation prior to 14 February 2008 and expects
sufficient implementation data will be available by 15 May 2008.

nla_internal_2223145.jpg also on XForms 1.0 Third Edition: http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2007-10-30-a.html

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All Interface Technologies by Market Dominators Should be QA-ed,
ZRAND Standards!
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Opinion

The trouble with standards is that there are not enough of them. There
is a strong public interest in having the interface technologies of
market dominators (which would include near monopolists and long-term
super-profit-takers) out in the open, unencumbered, zero royalty,
non-discriminatory licensed, and with the documentation QAed by an
independent group which may include experts and rivals and stakeholders.
And there is indeed a great system set up for this: ISO, the
International Organization for Standardization. First, I should clear
up a misunderstanding that many people fall into: a technical standard
from ISO is not a regulation. According to ISO, It is always the
adopter's responsibility to look at the available specifications and
see which ones are useful, and in which contexts. Second, for ISO
standards, multiple standards for the same area the norm not the
exception. In fact: look at the dozens of standards for graphics
formats, the multiple standards for programming languages, the multiple
standards for operating systems, the multiple standards for schema
languages and so on. Putting a proprietary standard through the standards
mill does not prevent other rival technologies becoming standards, nor
does it necessarily obsolete an existing standards. Standards are not
a race... My key point is that once a company's success in an area
brings it to the point of market domination (or long-term
super-profit-taker) then anti-trust regulators need to ensure that
their interface technologies are open enough for the usual
level-playing field concerns to be addressed. It needs to be just
a cost of doing business, once you reach a certain point.

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/12/all_interface_technologies_by.html

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Alfresco Aligns With Adobe
Chris Kanaracus, InfoWorld

Alfresco has updated its open-source content management platform,
integrating it with services like iGoogle and MediaWiki. The release
also features an integration with Adobe's Flex 2 Web development
framework. The relationship with Flex is meant to encourage
development of rich Internet applications on top of Alfresco.
Alfresco gives its software away and makes money on support. It
claims 20,000 installations, including among large enterprises such
as Morgan Stanley. Microsoft has also positioned its competing product,
SharePoint, as a social computing platform. Ian Howells (Alfresco
chief marketing officer): "What we've pulled together is the de
facto, standard tools people are already using... What we're doing
is sort of giving you all the classic enterprise control, but in a
social-networking platform. Customers can expect the platform to
evolve fluidly; we've created an environment that enables us to
integrate to other tools rapidly ... so we can innovate quickly,
not in 12- to 18-month release cycles." Alfresco is building to a
3.0 release, likely in the first half of 2008.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/12/03/Alfresco-aligns-with-Adobe-bashes-SharePoint_1.html
See also the Alfresco announcement: http://www.alfresco.com/media/releases/2007/12/open_source_social_computing_platform/

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No Searching for the Swicki: It's Here
Clint Boulton, eWEEK

The Swicki (search-wiki) custom search tool arrives as a more
socially-minded alternative to customized search from Google and
Yahoo. The swicki, formally launched Dec. 4 by search software
specialist Eurekster, is a custom search portal and social search
widget. The software, free for consumers, also boasts new automation
features to make building a swicki simpler. Users may customize a
swicki search portal on any topic, choosing content from blogs, Web
sites, images, video and RSS feeds, and share the widget to a
community of users. However, instead of returning millions of results
like a generic search engine, swickis "learn" from the search behavior
of the community, theoretically making it easier for the next user to
find what they're looking for. Here's how it works: Swickis scan the
data indexed by multiple search feeds plus all additional sources
specified by the swicki builder to provide relevant results. The
swickis take into account keyword, clicks, votes and behavior recorded
from every search, so the search results ranking constantly changes.
Swickis also automatically update themselves based on the user's
online behavior.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2227882,00.asp

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Extensible Markup Language (XML) Format Extension for Representing
Copy Control Attributes in Resource Lists
Miguel A. Garcia-Martin and Gonzalo Camarillo (eds),

The IESG announced that members of the IETF Session Initiation Proposal
Investigation (SIPPING) Working Group have released a candidate Proposed
Standard draft of "Extensible Markup Language (XML) Format Extension
for Representing Copy Control Attributes in Resource Lists." The IESG
plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits final
comments on this action. In certain types of multimedia communications,
a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) request is distributed to a group
of SIP User Agents (UAs). The sender sends a single SIP request to a
server which further distributes the request to the group. This SIP
request contains a list of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), which
identify the recipients of the SIP request. This URI-list is expressed
as a resource list XML document. This specification defines an XML
extension to the XML resource list format that allows the sender of
the request to qualify a recipient with a copy control level similar
to the copy control level of existing e-mail systems. It provides an
extension that enables the sender to supply a copy control attribute
that labels each recipient as a "to", "cc", or "bcc" recipient. This
attribute indicates whether the recipient is receiving a primary copy
of the SIP request, a carbon copy, or a blind carbon copy. Additionally,
we provide the sender with the capability of indicating in the URI-list
that one or more resources should be anonymized, so that some
recipients' URIs are not disclosed to the other recipients. Instead,
these URIs are replaced with anonymous URIs.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-ietf-sipping-capacity-attribute-05.txt
See also the SIPPING Working Group Charter: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/sipping-charter.html

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New XBRL Taxonomy a 'Boon to Investors'
Michael Hickins, eWEEK

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is releasing a new taxonomy
for Extensible Business Reporting Language on December 4, 2007 in the
hopes of improving financial reporting and analysis. An XBRL taxonomy,
which is akin to an XML schema, describes a standard way to report
business information. The SEC has been encouraging public companies
to file their public financial disclosures using XBRL on a voluntary
basis. David Blaszkowsky, director for the office of interactive
disclosure at the SEC, said during an XBRL conference held in Vancouver,
British Columbia, that the new taxonomy represents "a tremendous boon
to investors" because it provides greater access to information buried
in financial reports. Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun
Microsystems, and one of the original architects of XML, said XBRL will
allow financial services firms and individual investors to dive into
public company statements more efficiently than they can now: "XBRL
tries to make information machine-processable. The end result is that
the language will make it trivial to run a comparison across an entire
sector and get an answer in seconds." XBRL "is a powerful and flexible
version of XML which has been defined specifically to meet the
requirements of business and financial information. It enables unique
identifying tags to be applied to items of financial data, such as
'net profit'. However, these are more than simple identifiers. They
provide a range of information about the item, such as whether it is
a monetary item, percentage or fraction. XBRL allows labels in any
language to be applied to items, as well as accounting references or
other subsidiary information."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2228101,00.asp
See also the XBRL web site: http://www.xbrl.org/

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Red Hat Announces Real-Time Additions to Linux
Peter Judge, ZDNet UK

Open-source specialist Red Hat has launched a "real-time" addition to
its Linux operating system, which it claims will make some features run
100 times faster than rival technologies. Red Hat's Messaging Real-time
Grid (MRG) was launched as a beta on Tuesday [2007-12-04] with a full
release in the first half of 2008. MRG is an addition to the open-source
specialist's Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, and is designed for
businesses such as banks that need to carry out transactions on their
IT systems as instantaneously as possible, or "real-time". MRG includes
message-queuing middleware, that allows applications to communicate
with each other. It is the first commercial implementation of Advanced
Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), an open-source system that [Red Hat
VP Scott] Crenshaw claims is 100 times faster than competing proprietary
products from Tibco and IBM... MRG is the first fruit of the vendor's
Linux automation strategy announced last month which Red Hat applies
to its efforts to simplify the building of enterprise infrastructure,
for both users and software vendors. The other notable feature of the
MRG platform is its grid capability, which will allow enterprise
applications to "steal" spare processor cycles from Linux desktops.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39291262,00.htm
See also the press release: http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2007/mrg.html

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Intel Launches XML Suite Aimed at Enterprise SOA
Andy Dornan, NetworkComputing.com

Intel today announced that it is shipping the XML Software Suite, a
set of libraries for Java and C++ that implement common XML functions
such as parsing, schema validation and language transformation. Based
on technology acquired with XML appliance maker Sarvega more than two
years ago, the suite aims to boost performance of application servers
and SOA middleware. Intel has previously used the Sarvega technology
as a way to drive demand for its chips, but this launch looks like an
aggressive move into software. It also signals a change in Intel's
target customers: Whereas Intel previously aimed its technology mostly
at OEMs, it now hopes to sell directly to enterprise customers too.
Although Intel recommends that customers use hardware based its own
Core microarchitecture, the suite will work with any 32- or 64-bit
x86 chips. Intel's own performance comparisons are against other
software, claiming improvement by a factor of two or better vs.
open-source XML libraries included with GNOME and Apache. The real
competitor is still specialist XML chipmaker Tarari, whose silicon
is used in hardware acceleration appliances from vendors including
Cisco Systems and Layer 7 Technologies. To a lesser extent, IBM plays
in the same market, building its own XML chips for its own appliances.
However, by selling to enterprises directly, Intel is also competing
with the appliance makers themselves, something that could cause
tensions with its own customers. According to Intel, the software's
main advantage over hardware appliances is a full implementation of
the JAXP (Java API for XML Processing) standard, allowing it to be
used alongside existing applications without rewriting. However,
this only applies to Java. There are no similar standards for C++.
And although the software is available for Windows as well as Linux,
it doesn't support.NET applications.

http://www.networkcomputing.com/channels/appinfrastructure/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204600835
See also the http://www.intel.com/software/xmlsoftwaresuite

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XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 04 December 2007