Back to newsletter listDate:
Fri, February 08, 2008 06:29:50 AMFrom:
Robin Cover
Subject:
XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 07 February 2008
XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 07 February 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
Primeton http://www.primeton.com
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HEADLINES:
* Aggregate RSS and Atom information using XQuery
* OpenID Foundation Scores Top-Shelf Board Members
* Apache Tuscany Java 1.1 Released: SCA Meets Web 2.0
* OpenXML: A Poster Child for Open Standards Development?
* Observatory Service Broker (OSB) Contributed to CECID
* DMTF and Green Grid Team to Improve Data Center Interoperability
* LoST: A Location-to-Service Translation Protocol
* 2007 Turing Award Winners Announced for Work on Model Checking
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Aggregate RSS and Atom information using XQuery
Martin Brown, IBM developerWorks
The Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom standards provide XML
structures of items for a variety of different uses. The most common
use for both RSS and Atom feeds is as the data dissemination format to
promote Weblogs and news sites. The RSS and Atom feeds contain relatively
small amounts of information. Thus, you can easily download the files
and reduce the load on the Web servers rather than supply all of the
information normally distributed when the user views a full page of blog
posts. In addition, the RSS and Atom files also contain more detailed
classification information such as author, title, subject and keyword
tagging information to help identify and organize the data within the
feeds. In this article we look at the basics of XQuery processing of
RSS and Atom feeds to turn a single feed into an HTML document. We then
produce a more complete solution for outputting the information in a
format that suits your needs, including sorting, merging multiple feeds
and even handling different feed and source information types. XQuery
offers a flexible method to process XML files. Some find this method is
easier to follow syntactically. Certainly some XQuery abilities, such
as the flexibility to create to a single intermediary XML document that
you can reparse to handle different sources and input formats, help
solve some issues experienced when you process XML files.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xqueryrss/
See also Atom references: http://xml.coverpages.org/atom.html
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OpenID Foundation Scores Top-Shelf Board Members
Caroline McCarthy, CNET News.com
If the OpenID Foundation were a liquor cabinet, it just got stocked with
some Grey Goose, Rhum Clement, and Gran Patron. The foundation, which
is pushing for a universal Internet login standard, announced on
Thursday that representatives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, and
VeriSign have become its first corporate board members. They join
existing board members Scott Kveton (Vidoop), David Recordon (Six Apart),
Dick Hardt (Sxip Identity), Martin Atkins (independent), Artur Bergman
(Wikia), Johannes Ernst (NetMesh), Drummond Reed (Parity Communications),
and executive director Bill Washburn. According to the announcement:
"Last year, OpenID grew by leaps and bounds both as a technology and as
a community. At the beginning of 2006, there were fewer than 20-million
OpenID enabled URLs and less than 500 websites where they could be used.
Today there are over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000
websites to accept them. OpenID has grown to be implemented by major
open source projects such as Drupal, cornerstone Web 2.0 services such
as those by 37signals and Six Apart, as well as a mix of large companies
including as Apple, Google, and Yahoo!. Today is about truly recognizing
the accomplishments of the entire OpenID community which has certainly
grown beyond the small grassroots community where it started in late 2005.
One of the other accomplishments of the Foundation in 2007 was working
with AOL, Microsoft, VeriSign, Sun, Symantec, and Yahoo! to develop an
intellectual property rights policy and process for technical OpenID
specification work which was finalized in December 2007. While all of
these community accomplishments have been great, each was made possible
by the community's willingness to include the resources of companies
alongside the efforts of individual contributors. By bringing on these
companies and their resources, the OpenID Foundation will now be able to
better serve the needs of the entire OpenID community."
http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9866802-36.html
See also the announcement: http://openid.net/2008/02/07/evolving-the-openid-foundation-board/
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Apache Tuscany Java 1.1 Released: SCA Meets Web 2.0
Jean-Jacques Dubray, InfoQueue
The Apache Tuscany team announced today the Version 1.1 release of the
Java SCA project. Apache Tuscany is a runtime environment based on the
Service Component Architecture (SCA). SCA is a new component model that
facilitates the construction of composite applications. SCA is a set of
specifications initially developed by IBM and BEA which are now being
standardized by OASIS as part of the Open Composite Services Architecture
(Open CSA). The Tuscany SCA Java 1.1 release adds a number of features
including: (1) a JMS binding; (2) improved policy support; (3) an
implementation extension for representing client side Javascript
applications as SCA components. Jean-Sebastien Delfino and Luciano
Resende (IBM) commented in an InfoQ interview. JS, on the "widget"
implementation: "you can now include, in an SCA composition, client
components implemented as HTML + Javascript the AJAX way, running in
your Web browser, wired to server-side components using Tuscany's
JSON-RPC and ATOM bindings for example. Basically it is about embracing
Web 2.0 client components in a distributed SCA composition... We generate
some additional JavaScript after introspection of the references the
implements all the the plumbing code to support JSON-RPC and ATOM and
the Reference class wrapping the references that you can use in your
business logic. The Tuscany community will have to decide what's coming
ahead, as we're just getting 1.1 out, but I envision progress in the
following areas: simpler and more complete SCA policy support; more
policies -- making progress with the transaction policy; improved
end-to-end SCA contribution / deployment / distribution story; an SCA
domain administration application; integration with Geronimo;
improvements of the Web 2.0 bindings -- perhaps using Apache Abdera
for ATOM and adding cross-domain support to the JSON-RPC binding;
optimizations of the Tuscany databinding support; more platform
integration testing on Tomcat, Geronimo, etc." Luciano: "BPEL support
is not complete yet: services are supported, but references are not;
properties are not supported either, but they will require an extension
to the BPEL language. This may come next if it is requested by the
community. I have just updated the BPEL implementation guide."
http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/02/tuscany-java-1.1
See also the OASIS Open Composite Services Architecture (CSA) Member Section: http://www.oasis-opencsa.org/
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OpenXML: A Poster Child for Open Standards Development?
Patrick Durusau, Open Letter
"I have seen some attacks on OpenXML saying it is not an 'open' standard.
I am quite puzzled by those attacks and think that OpenXML makes the
case for open development of standards. Understand that as the Project
Editor for ISO/IEC 26300 and the OpenDocument Format TC editor in OASIS,
I carry no brief for OpenXML. However, a well defined and publicly
controlled OpenXML would be a great benefit for future work on the
OpenDocument Format standard so I have no reason to wish it ill. OpenXML
has progressed from being developed in a closed environment to being
handed over to approximately 70% of the world's population for future
development so I am missing the 'not open' aspect of OpenXML. If
anything, the improvements made to OpenXML during that process make it
a poster child for the open standards development process... Ecma TC
45 is composed of a wide variety of users, developers and others
interests who wanted to see Microsoft Corporation adopt an XML based
format for its office software. Over the course of a year with a very
aggressive meeting schedule, TC 45 produced a document that was
approximately three (3) times longer than the original submission and
that was in many ways a better proposal. That to me illustrates the
difference between talking to yourself and opening up the development
process to a larger group of people. After being revised by TC 45,
OpenXML was submitted via fast-track for approval as an ISO/IEC standard
(DIS 29500) in JTC 1/SC 34. If you look at the roster for SC 34,
approximately 70% of the world's population has a seat at the table
via their national bodies to discuss the final version of OpenXML. The
fast track process created unnaturally short deadlines but the national
bodies labored very hard to produce over 3,000 comments on OpenXML and
TC 45 labored just as hard to produce answers for those comments.
Answers that often offered substantial changes, I think for the better,
to OpenXML."
http://www.durusau.net/publications/OpenXMLPosterChild.pdf
See also Rick Jelliffe's blog: http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/02/significant_open_letter_from_p.html
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Observatory Service Broker (OSB) Contributed to CECID
Staff, University of Hong Kong CECID Announcement
The University of Hong Kong Center for E-Commerce Infrastructure
Development (CECID) announced that the Observatory Service Broker
(OSB) has been contributed to the open-source community website. The
Observatory Service Broker (OSB) is one of the project deliverable of
Project Plumber. The OSB is an enhanced version of a process-driven
enterprise service bus, which supports a choreography-based business
process. It is based on a published Java standard JSR 208: Java
Business Integration (JBI). JBI is a Java-based standard addressing the
EAI and B2B issues based on the paradigms and principles advocated by
SOA. It defines the standards for composite plug-ins in SOA architecture,
as well as how the plug-ins can communicate with each other. Along with
the OSB, there is a Business Process State Tracking (BPST) engine
registering the rule sets to guide the execution of business processes
and keep track the state of each rule set. The business integration
SPIs enable the creation of a Java business integration environment
for specifications such as WSCI, BPEL4WS, and the W3C Choreography
Working Group. OSB, BPST, and their source code have been released to
CECID open-source community website under GNU General Public License
Version 2. Later on, useful information and articles ranging from
technical issue to general usage of OSB will be available at the
community website. Commenced on March 2006, the Project Plumber aims
to research and develop a software platform to facilitate enterprises
to design and implement service oriented applications to transact with
business partners based on key business-to-business (B2B) standards.
The objectives of this project are to extend Service-Oriented
Architecture (SOA) to support processing of electronic transactions
between enterprises, to develop Web Service components to support
reliable and secure B2B applications based on open standards like
Universal Business Language (UBL), and to develop service modeling
methodology and software to facilitate design of electronic transaction
services.
http://xml.coverpages.org/CECID-OSB-200802.html
See also Project Plumber: http://www.cecid.hku.hk/projectplumber.php
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DMTF and Green Grid Team to Improve Data Center Interoperability
The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) has announced a plan
to work with The Green Grid to develop standards designed to improve
interoperability of technology solutions within the data center. DMTF
and The Green Grid plan to collaborate to develop an interface for
heterogeneous management, across data centers, and for IT and non-IT
equipment. The Green Grid is a global consortium chartered to develop
energy efficiency standards, processes, measurements and technologies
for global data centers and business computing ecosystems. As DMTF is
an industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion
of interoperable management initiatives and standards, DMTF will
support The Green Grid in reaching its mission. In order to support
its goals, The Green Grid will actively pursue the DMTF's Web-Based
Enterprise Management (WBEM), a suite of management and Internet
standard technologies developed to unify the management of distributed
computing environments. WBEM will form the basis of the management
interfaces The Green Grid defines. As a DMTF collaborator, The Green
Grid will be able to leverage and extend the DMTF technologies and
apply them to help improve energy efficiency in the data center and
business computing ecosystems. In addition, the partnership will benefit
The Green Grid by providing access to the expertise and broad membership
of DMTF. As the newest member of the DMTF Alliance Partner program,
which defines formalized liaison relationships between the DMTF and
other key standards bodies, The Green Grid anticipates producing
interface specifications based upon WBEM technologies in approximately
12-18 months. DMTF WBEM Protocols include CIM-XML (a WBEM protocol that
uses XML over HTTP to exchange Common Information Model [CIM] information)
and WS-Management (a specification which promotes interoperability
between management applications and managed resources by identifying a
core set of Web service specifications and usage requirements to expose
a common set of operations).
http://www.dmtf.org/newsroom/pr/view?item_key=c510c2710ab7867a9405460993e86d5cafda6b30
See also DMTF Desktop and Mobile Architecture for System Hardware (DASH): http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2007-03-23-a.html
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LoST: A Location-to-Service Translation Protocol
Ted Hardie, Andrew Newton (et al., eds); IETF Internet Draft
Members of the IETF Emergency Context Resolution with Internet
Technologies (ECRIT) Working Group have published an updated Internet
Draft for the "LoST: A Location-to-Service Translation Protocol"
specification. The 77-page specification describes an XML-based protocol
for mapping service identifiers and geodetic or civic location
information to service contact URIs. In particular, it can be used to
determine the location-appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP)
for emergency services. Appendix A supplies a corresponding
non-normative RELAX NG Schema in XML Syntax. Protocols such as NAPTR
records and the Service Location Protocol (SLP) can be used to discover
servers offering a particular service. However, for an important class
of services the appropriate specific service instance depends both on
the identity of the service and the geographic location of the entity
that needs to reach it. Emergency telecommunications services are an
important example; here, the service instance is a Public Safety
Answering Point that has jurisdiction over the location of the user
making the call. The document describes a protocol for mapping a
service identifier and location information compatible with PIDF-LO
to one or more service URIs. Service identifiers take the form of the
service URNs; location information here includes revised civic location
information and a subset of the PIDL-LO profile which consequently
includes the Geo-Shapes defined for Geography Markup Language (GML).
Example service URI schemes include SIP, XMPP, and TEL. While the
initial focus is on providing mapping functions for emergency services,
it is likely that the protocol is applicable to other service URNs. For
example, in the United States, the "2-1-1" and "3-1-1" service numbers
follow a similar location-to- service behavior as emergency services.
LoST Satisfies the requirements for mapping protocols, providing a
number of operations, centered around mapping locations and service
URNs to service URLs and associated information. For civic addresses,
LoST can indicate which parts of the civic address are known to be
valid or invalid, thus providing address validation. LoST indicates
errors in the location data to facilitate debugging and proper user
feedback, but also provides best-effort answers. LoST queries can be
resolved recursively or iteratively.
http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-ietf-ecrit-lost-07.txt
See also XML and Emergency Management: http://xml.coverpages.org/emergencyManagement.html
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2007 Turing Award Winners Announced for Work on Model Checking
Staff, DDJ
Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis are the
recipients of the 2007 A.M. Turing Award for their work on an automated
method for finding design errors in computer hardware and software. The
method, called Model Checking, is the most widely used technique for
detecting and diagnosing errors in complex hardware and software design.
It has helped to improve the reliability of complex computer chips,
systems and networks. According to the ACM announcement, "Model Checking
started as an academic research idea. The continuing research of Clarke,
Emerson, and Sifakis as well as others in the international research
community over the last 27 years led to the creation of new logics, as
well as new algorithms and surprising theoretical results. This in turn
has stimulated the creation of many Model Checking tools by both academic
and industrial teams, resulting in the widespread industrial use of Model
Checking... Among the beneficiaries of Model Checking are personal
computer users, medical device makers, and nuclear power plant operators.
As computerized systems pervade daily life, consumers rely on digital
controllers to supervise critical functions of cars, airp***s, and
industrial plants. Digital switching technology has replaced analog
components in the telecommunications industry, and security protocols
enable e-commerce applications and privacy. Wherever significant
investments or human lives are at risk, quality assurance for the
underlying hardware and software components becomes paramount. The
Turing Award, named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, carries
a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation
and Google Inc.
http://www.ddj.com/206103622
See also the ACM announcement: http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/turing-award-07/
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