Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 18 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
BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com
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HEADLINES:

* Liberty Alliance Publishes SAML 2.0 Interoperability Testing Matrix
* FIQL: The Feed Item Query Language
* SugarCRM Offers Biggest Upgrade Yet
* XForms: Who Needs Killer Apps?
* Orbeon Forms 3.6 Final Release
* XForms and Ruby on Rails at the Doctor's Office, Part 1

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Liberty Alliance Publishes SAML 2.0 Interoperability Testing Matrix
Staff, Liberty Alliance Announcement

Liberty Alliance announced that products from Hewlett-Packard, IBM,
RSA (The Security Division of EMC), Sun Microsystems, and Symlabs, Inc.
have passed Liberty Alliance testing for SAML 2.0 interoperability.
The Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) Specification Version
2.0 was approved as an OASIS Standard in March 2005. Products and
services passing SAML 2.0 interoperability testing included:
Hewlett-Packard's HP Select Federation 7.0; IBM's Tivoli Federated
Identity Manager, version 6.2; RSA's Federated Identity Manager 4.0;
Sun Microsystems' Java System Federated Access Manager 8.0; Symlabs
Inc's Federated Identity Suite version 3.3.0. The vendors participated
in the November 2007 Liberty Interoperable event administered by the
Drummond Group Inc. and are the first to pass full-matrix testing
Liberty Alliance incorporated into its interoperability program this
year. All of these vendors also passed Liberty Alliance testing against
the US GSA SAML 2.0 profile, meeting the prerequisite interoperability
requirements for participating in the US E-Authentication Identity
Federation. Liberty Alliance continually enhances the Liberty
Interoperable program to meet cross-industry demands for proven
interoperable identity solutions. The November event was the first to
conduct Internet-based and full-matrix testing. Internet-based testing
allows vendors to participate in the same interoperability event from
anywhere in the world. Full-matrix testing requires each vendor to
test with every other participant to ensure testing mirrors real word
identity federation interoperability requirements. The breadth and
depth of these testing procedures provides deploying organizations
with assurances that products have proven to interoperate with each
other across the widest possible range of deployment scenarios.

http://xml.coverpages.org/LibertySAMLv20-Matrix.html
See also the Matrix: http://www.projectliberty.org/liberty_interoperable/interoperable_products/saml_2_0_test_procedure_v3_0_full_matrix_product_table

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FIQL: The Feed Item Query Language
Mark Nottingham (ed), IETF Internet Draft

An initial public draft of "FIQL: The Feed Item Query Language" has
been released. The Feed Item Query Language (FIQL, pronounced "fickle")
is a simple but flexible, URI-friendly syntax for expressing filters
across the entries in a syndicated feed. For example, a query
"title==foo*;(updated=lt=-P1D,title==*bar)" would return all entries
in a feed that meet the following criteria; (1) have a title beginning
with "foo", AND (2) have been updated in the last day OR have a title
ending with "bar". The specification defines an extensible syntax for
FIQL queries, explains their use in HTTP, and defines feed extensions
for discovering and describing query interfaces. On the Atom list,
the author responded to a question "Why not XPath or XQuery or SPARQL
(with an Atom/RDF mapping), or CSS selectors or some subset of one of
those?" In a nutshell, there are two reasons; [i] Those query languages
are optimised for data models that aren't feeds; respectively, XML
Infosets, Infosets again, RDF graphs and CSS cascades. While it's
possible to contort them to fit feeds, they don't really lend themselves
to it. XQuery and SPARQL also present a fairly high barrier to adoption
(if you're not a big XML vendor or a SW-head, respectively ;) Contorting
them so that they're easy to fit into a URL isn't too attractive,
either. [ii] When you expose a query interface, you're allowing people
to consume compute power on your servers. An arbitrary query language
allows arbitrary queries, which is unacceptable when you're working
across administrative domains. FIQL gives you tools to constrain how
queries are shaped. I've been asked this many times, and should probably
add it as a FAQ in an appendix. Certainly there are use cases for using
XQuery, etc. against feeds, but it's also become apparent that there's
a place for something simple, reasonably flexible, and Web-friendly.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-nottingham-atompub-fiql-00.txt
See also Atom references: http://xml.coverpages.org/atom.html

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SugarCRM Offers Biggest Upgrade Yet
Chris Kanaracus, InfoWorld

SugarCRM has released the 5.0 version of its open-source customer
relationship management software following a long period of development
and testing. Sugar 5.0 features improvements in three main areas:
A new on-demand architecture designed to improve security, tools that
let nontechnical users build custom modules, and an AJAX e-mail client
that is compatible with any server that supports the POP3 protocol. The
release also delivers upgraded dashboarding capabilities. The software
went through three beta cycles and was tested more than 30,000 times
by members of SugarCRM's open-source community, said Chris Harrick,
senior director of product marketing for the Cupertino, California,
company. Harrick said the open-source development model allows software
to be vetted far more thoroughly than an in-house quality testing team
can. In a space crowded by seemingly similar CRM offerings, SugarCRM
has tried to differentiate itself partly through fostering a user-friendly
image, according to Martens. The company's attitude, according to China
Martens (an analyst with the 451 Group) is: "Forget about the technical
guys, we're Sugar and you can configure us. We're friendly."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/12/18/SugarCRM-offers-biggest-upgrade-yet_1.html

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XForms: Who Needs Killer Apps?
Kurt Cagle, O'Reilly Opinion

The XML 2007 Conference has come and gone, with as usual a number of
thought provoking talks and controversies. During the evening of the
first day, there was a special XForms Evening, with a number of the
industry gurus in that space providing very good examples of why XForms
is a compelling technology and here to stay... When you stop and think
about it, you might begin to realize how very unusual XForms is in that
regard. It's an application layer that transcends the implementation
it is written in. It doesn't matter whether I'm writing an XForms
component in C++ or Java or XUL or JavaScript -- what is important is
that I can send run the same 'applications' on any system, that the
ecosystem is fitting XForms in where it can, despite the very best
efforts of certain vendors to kill it... Pundits will continue declaring
its imminent demise, year after year, and yet, year after year, it'll
end up on more servers, more desktops, more browsers and mobile devices.
Thus, my anticipation is that the number of XForms specialists will
remain comparatively small for some time to come, but they will be
educating others, who will quietly be incorporating XForms as a way of
life into their applications. Some (many) of those will come from the
AJAX community, both as AJAX implementations of XForms continue to
proliferate and as many who work at the intersection of AJAX and XML
understand that while they CAN continue to rebuild the wheel with every
app, they can get a lot farther with XForms as part of their toolkit...
I think that you need to make a distinction here between 'the industry'
and a few companies such as Microsoft or Adobe. There are actually a
number of vendors in this space that are doing quite well thank you,
especially as interest in large XML vocabularies such as XBRL, HL7 and
other vertical efforts continue to rise. IBM's Workplace forms
incorporates XForms, as Sun had done with OpenOffice, Firefox has had
XForms support ongoing for nearly two years, and products such as Orbeon,
Formsplayer and Picoforms have continued to gain adherents. XForms
support in desktop browsers is moving slowly, unfortunately, a space
where more innovation needs to happen, but at the same time support
DOES exist in one form or another, even if such support is not always
native. On the flip-side, part of the change is also coming from the
XForms working group, as they realize that while it is POSSIBLE to
create a stand-alone application layer in XML, its not necessarily
desirable to keep everything constrained to that one layer.

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/12/xforms_who_needs_killer_apps.html
See also XML and Forms: http://xml.coverpages.org/xmlForms.html

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Orbeon Forms 3.6 Final Release
Staff, Orbeon Announcement

Developers have announced the final release of Orbeon Forms 3.6. Orbeon
Forms is an open source forms solution that handles the complexity of
forms typical of the enterprise or government. It is delivered to
standard web browsers (including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and
Opera) thanks to XForms and Ajax technology, with no need for client-side
software or plugins. Orbeon Forms allows you to build fully interactive
forms with features that include as-you-type validation, optional and
repeated sections, always up-to-date error summaries, PDF output, full
internationalization, and controls like auto-completion, tabs, dialogs,
trees and menus. Orbeon Forms 3.6 features over 170 improvements since
Orbeon Forms 3.5.1, including major improvements in the areas of state
handling, XML Schema validation, error handling, deployment within Java
applications, and performance. In previous versions, XML Schema
validation always followed a strict mode where all instances had to
be strictly valid as per imported schema definitions. In particular,
this meant that if you imported a schema, the top-level element of an
instance had to have a valid schema definition or the instance would
be entirely invalid. In version 3.6, Orbeon Forms implements a "lax"
validation mode by default, where only elements that have definitions
in the imported schemas are validated. Other elements are not considered
for validation. This is in line with XML Schema and XSLT 2.0 lax
validation modes. Founded in 1999, Orbeon is headquartered in Silicon
Valley and maintains a field office in Switzerland.

http://xml.coverpages.org/OrbeonFormsV36.html
See also the XML 2007 blog: http://www.orbeon.com/blog/2007/12/05/great-success-of-the-xforms-evening-at-the-xml-2007-conference/

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XForms and Ruby on Rails at the Doctor's Office, Part 1
Michael Galpin, IBM developerWorks

This is the first article in a four-part series about using XForms,
IBM DB2 pureXML, and Ruby together to more easily create Web applications.
We examine how XForms, DB2 pureXML, and Ruby on Rails can help you more
rapidly build XML-centric Web applications. We examine how XForms
simplifies creating an interactive front end. You will get the
interactivity of Ajax, but without having to write any JavaScript or
mapping code. We look at how easy it is to store and query XML using
DB2 pureXML: DB2's SQL/XML will let you mix SQL and XQuery together
to easily access XML data in your database. Finally, we look at how
to set up Ruby on Rails to work with DB2 pureXML. With just a few minor
adjustments, we were able to create XML-enabled tables in DB2 using
Ruby on Rails. XForms allows you to define your data in a simple XML
model and your view using standard HTML form elements. XForms then
provides declarative mapping between these elements. That means you
will not have to write either client-side or server-side code for
taking some submitted value and inserting into an XML structure. XForms
handles it for you. It even does all of this asynchronously: changes
in the HTML form are bound to the XML model and sent to the server
for synchronization. You get the benefits of Ajax without having to
write any JavaScript.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xformsruby1/

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XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 18 December 2007