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XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 31 January 2008
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
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com
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HEADLINES:

* Building Asynchronous Services using Service Component Architecture
* eGovernment and the Web Workshop Report: Toward More Transparent Government
* Sanjiva Weerawarana on Open Source SOA Middleware
* Atomojo Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) Server 0.7.0 Release Available
* Rogue Wave Accelerates SOA Data Services Creation in C++
* Google, NTT and the US GSA Deploy SAML 2.0 for Digital Identity Management
* WS-Are-We-There-Yet
* Russia is Open to Open Protocols

COVER PAGES:

* OGC Approves Sensor Web Observations and Measurements Encoding Standard

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Building Asynchronous Services using Service Component Architecture
Mark Edwards, InfoQueue

Mike Edwards of IBM discusses the need for asynchronous services when
you build an application using a service-oriented architecture.
Building asynchronous services can get complicated, but is made
straightforward using Service Component Architecture (SCA). The steps
involved in using SCA to create an asynchronous service and asynchronous
service client are described in this article. "Asynchronous services,
where responses are returned a long time after an initial request is
made, are simply a fact of life -- not everything happens immediately!
[...] Facilities for writing clients to synchronous services are well
provided by most programming models and frameworks. The same can be
said for writing synchronous services. The synchronous call-and-return
model is the standard form for writing code in most programming languages.
As a result, writing a synchronous service or a synchronous service
client is usually not much more than a simple extension of the regular
programming model. In Java, for example, this usually means that a
service is implemented as a method in a class, while the service client
is the invocation of a method on a class... Providing Asynchronous
service implementations and also providing clients to asynchronous
services is made simpler with Service Component Architecture. SCA
provides a request followed by callback response model for asynchronous
services, allied with the use of callbackID to tie the original request
to the callback response. SCA enables this to be done for a variety of
underlying communication methods between the client and the service,
eliminating the need for the code to be dependent on complex middleware
APIs.

http://www.infoq.com/articles/async-sca
See also the Apache Tuscany Project: http://cwiki.apache.org/TUSCANY/

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eGovernment and the Web Workshop Report: Toward More Transparent Government
Staff, W3C Announcement

W3C has published a Workshop Report: eGovernment and the Web Workshop:
"Toward More Transparent Government". On 18-19 June 2007, the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Science Research Initiative held
a workshop entitled, Toward More Transparent Government at the US National
Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. The goal of the workshop was to
find ways to facilitate the deployment of Web standards across eGovernment
sites and help shape the ongoing research agenda in the development of
Web technology and public policy in order to realize the potential of
the Web for access to and use of government information. The Call for
Participation had required participants to submit position papers.
Twenty-two (22) position papers were received. The workshop was chaired
by Daniel J. Weitzner (MIT/W3C), Ari Schwartz (Center for Democracy and
Technology) and Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton, UK). The
final workshop session considered key lessons learned and identified
possible next steps that W3C and WSRI could take together with the
eGovernment user, vendor and research communities around the world. After
two days of policy and technology presentations, the over-arching theme
heard over and over again is the need to take steps, institutional,
legal and technical, toward publishing data with re-use in mind. The
participants identified several steps to meet this goal...

http://www.w3.org/2007/06/eGov-dc/summary
See also the position papers: http://www.w3.org/2007/06/eGov-dc/papers/Overview.html

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Sanjiva Weerawarana on Open Source SOA Middleware
Stefan Tilkov, InfoQ

In this interview, Stefan Tilkov talks to Sanjiva Weerawarana about web
services and REST, about core standards that are essential for web
services standards, open source SOA tooling, scripting languages and
web services, and the strategy of WSO2 in providing open source
middleware. [As to key WS-* specifications:] The most important one
from a service oriented perspective, is the thing that is used to
describe what the service does. WSDL is the one that people are using
for that. There is a whole diversion of the spec that widely deployed,
WSDL 1.1. But WSDL 2.0 is a hugely improved spec; it's really not even
a WSDL, it's a completely different language in many, many ways.
Unfortunately adoption has been slow yet, it just came up this year, and
it is going to take some time to major vendors have to got to revisions
to get to that point, if they want to get there they have to have a much
better way to describe services. The other key spec is of course is the
base wire protocol that everybody uses which is SOAP, and there is a
series of specs that extend SOAP with security, with reliability,
transactions, and so there is WS-Security, WS-SecurePolicy and WS-Secure
Conversation and WS-Trust, those are the four security specs that matter.
On reliable messaging there is something called WS-ReliableMessaging,
in transactions there is something called the WS-AtomicTransaction,
WS-BusinessAgreement and WS-Coordination. There are many applications
where you never touched reliable messaging or transactions. So a large
percentage of the people who built web services would never actually
end up invoking these things, and in fact most people who actually use
web services shouldn't be knowing about these specs. This is the
underneath infrastructure that people like me who build web services
should know about...

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/sanjiva-open-source-soa

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Atomojo Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) Server 0.7.0 Release Available
Alex Milowski, Software Announcement

This atomojo Google Code 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 is a Firefox plugin that
contains an XPCOM component for interacting with the Atom Publishing
Protocol (APP). Atomojo's APP implementation has been coming along
quite nicely and release 0.7.0 is quite stable. Here's a short list
of some features: full APP implementation; hierarchical feeds; XQuery
support; large binary support; full REST interfaces for administration;
integration with external authentication services; indexing of Atom
category elements; retrieval of entries and feeds via categorization;
metadata services for context and query by term and term value. The
Atomojo server provides a uniform way to store multiple feeds and
manipulate them with the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP). Feeds are
organized hierarchically and indexed by their categorization. It
provides both metadata feeds for getting context information about
feeds as well as pulling a feed for each categorization stored in the
database. The 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...

http://code.google.com/p/atomojo/
See also Atom references: http://xml.coverpages.org/atom.html

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Rogue Wave Accelerates SOA Data Services Creation in C++
Staff, Rogue Wave Software Announcement

Rogue Wave has announced the release of Rogue Wave HydraSDO for XML 2.2
and the next edition of HydraSDO for Databases. Rogue Wave HydraSDO
data components automate the creation of high-performance,
service-oriented data services in Java and C++. The components enable
developers to expose any data source as lightweight, independent, and
decentralized data services through the Service Data Object (SDO) API,
the industry standard data access in SOA. Rogue Wave HydraSDO for
XML 2.2 enables XML documents to be read and updated using the SDO API.
HydraSDO for XML provides a data access service (DAS) for parsing XML
data and populating a DataGraph consisting of DataObjects and a Change
Summary. HydraSDO for Databases enables developers to use the SDO API
to access relational data in both loosely coupled and traditional
tightly coupled application architectures. The component provides
read/write capability for relational databases using the SDO API without
the need to write SQL statements. HydraSDO for Databases includes support
for leading databases including Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and Sybase
databases. Both XML and relational database data sources are made
available through the simple XML-style SDO interface, which can be used
by multiple applications as a real-time SOA data service. HydraSDO data
components work stand-alone or can be seamlessly integrated with Rogue
Wave HydraSCA, the first product available for deploying high-performance
SOA applications based on the Service Component Architecture (SCA)
specification.

http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/2078592.html

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Google, NTT and the US GSA Deploy SAML 2.0 for Digital Identity Management
Staff, Liberty Alliance Announcement

Liberty Alliance, the global identity consortium working to build a more
trusted internet for consumers, governments and businesses worldwide,
today released highlights of SAML 2.0-based digital identity management
applications that are delivering real world value to users and
organizations around the globe. These applications are among the many
public and private sector deployments helping to drive a more secure and
privacy-respecting internet identity layer across applications, sectors
and regions based on SAML 2.0 standards. With government organizations in
The Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe building and deploying SAML
2.0-based identity applications, SAML 2.0 has become the standard of
choice in the global eGovernment and public sectors. These governments
are relying on SAML 2.0 to deliver a wide variety of new online services
to citizens, help meet compliance mandates and to provide business and
trading partners with a secure and trusted platform for conducting
identity related transactions. A digital map and description of global
eGovernment deployments based on SAML 2.0 Liberty Federation is available...
Using SAML 2.0 allows Google's customers to treat web-based authentication
to Google Apps the same way they treat authentication to their other
services... NTT has developed SASSO, a personal Identity Provider that
enables users to single-sign-on to a PC and leverage the strong
authentication capabilities of the mobile phone to conduct a wide range
of secure identity-based transactions. SASSO uses the increasingly
ubiquitous mobile phone as an Identity Provider (IdP) to allow users to
access a Service Provider (SP). Once authenticated by their own mobile
phone, the IdP on the mobile phone issues a SAML assertion signed by a
private key and sends that assertion to SPs.

http://www.projectliberty.org/news_events/press_releases/google_ntt_and_the_us_gsa_deploy_saml_2_0_for_digital_identity_management
See also SAML references: http://xml.coverpages.org/saml.html

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WS-Are-We-There-Yet
Toby Considine, New Daedalus

We now have web services to almost any conceivable control system. We
have BACnet-XML and BACREST. We have TAC Web Services. We have LON XML.
We have oBIX. So...are we there yet? [...] One of the reasons that I
am watching NBIMS so closely from the oBIX vantage point is that the
higher semantics will need to be there before oBIX has an enterprise
interface. I have a hard time imagining what applying Policy to point
services even means. As Enterprise programmers will never be control
engineers, we are going to have to wrap up the standard functions
into business services. In oBIX if I define a set of functionalities
for a given period of time, it is called a contract. For these to be
useful, we will need to pre-define several contracts and make each of
them discoverable. Discovery will mean that we need to describe each
one in terms of the service it provides. The Description/Catalogue will
need to be machine readable rather than human readable, which means it
will be based on Semantics... I believe that as we all become more
familiar with NBIMS, we will be able to discover the Semantics needed
to do this. Somewhere in the check list of Services to be Commissioned,
in the Systems in the Energy Model, and even in the Function analyzed
by the Code Compliance checker are the Semantics needed to create
discoverable abstract services. And that XML will be an order of
magnitude more useful because it is semantically laden.

http://www.newdaedalus.com/articles/2008/1/29/ws-are-we-there-yet.html

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Russia is Open to Open Protocols
Andrey Golovin and Ken Sinclair, AutomatedBuildings.com

Golovin (Executive Director BIG-RU -- BACnet Interest Group Russia):
"I started with BACnet in 2005 when the BIG-RU (BACnet Interest Group
Russia) association was founded. Before then I was familiar with the
BACnet movement in the US. In my opinion, the Russian market is more
similar to the USA market, than the European. The main idea was to
bring the latest achievements in open standards to the Russian market
and BACnet was the best choice. During the last 2 years the BIG-RU has
familiarized an estimated 80% of building owners in Russia with BACnet
benefits. In 2007 the KNX Association (ex-EIB protocol) invited me to
manage their association in Russia while working with BIG-RU. It is a
great experience, because we can say that BACnet grew from HVAC systems,
and EIB/KNX grew from lighting and low-voltage systems. Both protocols
are relative and part of ISO standard 16484-5. We can now support our
customers with a wider field of open building standards applications.
Let's say that the joining of BACnet and KNX promotion work is a process
of globalization of the market of open standards in Russia... Nobody
wants to be locked into a single brand system. The situation is that
every open protocol should be implemented where it is practical.
Traditionally BACnet is more suitable for integration of large systems,
multi-vendor projects and systems which could be expanded in the future.
LonWorks is more often applicable in the field level (for products
integration) and in middle sized projects. Very often both protocols
exist in the same project: BACnet at the management level and automation
level, and LonWorks on the field level. A good example of such a system
is the 'Federation' Tower project in Moscow..."

http://www.automatedbuildings.com/news/jan08/interviews/071222051001golovin.htm
See also BACnet references: http://xml.coverpages.org/facilitiesXML.html#BACnet

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Selected From The Cover Pages, by Robin Cover
======================================================================

OGC Approves Sensor Web Observations and Measurements Encoding Standard

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced that its members have
approved version 1.0 of the Observations and Measurements Encoding
specification as a final OpenGIS Implementation Standard. The two-part
Observations and Measurements Encoding specification "defines an abstract
model and an XML schema encoding for observations and measurements. This
framework is required for use by other OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE)
standards as well as for general support for OGC compliant systems
dealing in technical measurements in science and engineering. As a new
international consensus standard in an era of increasing scientific
cooperation, O&M promises to play an important role in Web-based
publishing of real-time and archived scientific data across research
disciplines and application domains." An 'Observation' is an action with
a result which has a value describing some phenomenon. The observation
is modelled as a Feature within the context of the General Feature Model.
An observation feature binds a result to a feature of interest, upon
which the observation was made. The aim of the OpenGIS O&M Standard
is to "define terms used for measurements and the relationships between
them, mainly to improve the ability of software systems to discover and
use live and archived digital data produced by measuring systems. When
scientists and engineers encode data in O&M, they can easily publish
the data (or live data feeds) in catalogs and registries so others can
efficiently discover, access and use the data, using relatively simple
software. The scope of the specification covers observations and
measurements whose results may be quantities, categories, temporal and
geometry values, coverages, and composites and arrays of any of these."

http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2008-01-31-a.html

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XML Daily Newslink and Cover Pages are sponsored by:

BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com
EDS http://www.eds.com
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com
Primeton http://www.primeton.com
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Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

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