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XML Daily Newslink. Monday, 11 February 2008
A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org
Edited by Robin Cover

====================================================
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com
====================================================

HEADLINES:

* Tibco Adds Eclipse, ESB to SOA Platform
* XML at X; Film at XI
* Scenes from a Recommendation 1: Chicago, Cafe des Artistes
* Put to the Test: Nexaweb Enterprise Web Suite 2.0
* Open-Source Movement Turns 10
* Do We Really Need Structured Document Formats?
* WSO2 Joining Open-Source SOA Registry Field
* W3C's Excessive DTD Traffic
* The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends

COVER PAGES:

* New OASIS Standard: XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) v1.2

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Tibco Adds Eclipse, ESB to SOA Platform
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Tibco Software is now shipping its ActiveMatrix 2.0 platform for
managing SOA, featuring an Eclipse-based development environment and
an enterprise service bus. The platform offers expanded capabilities
for integration, composite application development, and governance,
Tibco said. Users can build and manage SOA applications, supporting
technologies such as Java, .Net, and service mediation. Applications
can be built that combine services developed with disparate technologies
and manage them via a single infrastructure. The platform features
several components, including ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks, for
integration, and ActiveMatrix Service Grid, for assembling services.
New to the platform is ActiveMatrix Service Bus, for on-ramping
services and implementing content or context-based routing. A common
environment based on the Eclipse platform is provided for business
analysts, architects, and developers for development and management.
ActiveMatrix covers a spectrum of capabilities ranging from service
virtualization, with developers able to build services in a tool of
their choice, to governance and integration. With ActiveMatrix 2.0,
Tibco seeks to help users manage large-scale SOA rollouts with a single
platform. Much of the technical coding involved in service creation
and deployment is replaced with configuration. Governance and management
capabilities enable administrators to deploy applications and apply
policies from a single console. Also featured is expanded support of
the Service Component Architecture (SCA) specification to improve
interoperability in deploying SOA.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/02/11/soa-tibco_1.html
See also the announcement: http://xml.coverpages.org/ActiveMatrix-v20.html

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XML at X; Film at XI
Eve Maler, Pushing String Blog

The original XML Recommendation is 10 years old today. Happy XML Day!
These anniversaries feel a little artificial to me; my first clear
memory of the XML work was a teleconference Jon Bosak had arranged among
the "SGML on the Web Editorial Review Board" members in June (?) 1996,
so for me XML is twelve and a half years old. As something of a birthday
present, today I'm publishing something SGML-flavored that I hope may
still be of use, or at least morbid interest, to modern XML
practitioners. You see, I cowrote a book in the just-prior-to-XML era
with another of my lifelong friends, Jeanne El Andaloussi, about SGML,
in SGML. In DocBook, as a matter of fact. That methodology I mentioned
above, with design principles and stuff? That came from this book. Now
that the book is out of print, she and I discussed the matter, and we
agreed to publish it here... You'll have to be the judge of how well
the content has stood the test of time, but I can tell you the markup
did beautifully. With a huge dollop of help from Norm Walsh (both his
DocBook stylesheets and his mad skillz), the SGML-to-XML-to-HTML
processing pipeline was downright trivial. Voila! We present to you
(online): "Developing SGML DTDs: From Text to Model to Markup."

http://www.xmlgrrl.com/blog/archives/2008/02/10/xml-at-x-film-at-xi/
See also the classic e-book: http://www.xmlgrrl.com/publications/DSDTD/toc.html

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Scenes from a Recommendation 1: Chicago, Cafe des Artistes
Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Messages in a Bottle, MSM's klog

The XML spec became a W3C Recommendation ten years ago this week. Tim
Bray has posted some character sketches from the period; Eve Maler has
followed suit with some recollections (and an online version of
Maler/El Andaloussi! Woo hoo!); this has inspired me to think about
doing the same. What follows is the first in (what I hope will be) a
series of moments I remember from the creation of XML. If you look,
you can find a lot of stories about the beginning of XML. It surprised
me, at first, that they all seem to be different; it surprised me even
more to find some told in the first person by people whom I had not
suspected of being involved with XML at all. But I shouldn't have been
surprised. Scores or hundreds of people were involved in the development
of XML, thousands in its spread and uptake. In some sense, then, XML
will have had scores, or hundreds, or thousands of beginnings. Why
should I think I know about them all? Questions like 'How did X start?'
often mean not 'How did X start?' but 'How did you come to be involved
in X?' -- or, at least, that's how we answer them. The beginnings of XML?
I don't know. But I'll tell you what I do know; I know when I first
heard about it. The second WWW conference was in Chicago, in October
1994. With Bob Goldstein, one of my colleagues at the University of
Illinois at Chicago computer center, I had submitted a paper on how
the Web would achieve its true potential only once it had SGML
awareness ('HTML to the Max')...

http://people.w3.org/~cmsmcq/blog/?p=36
See also Salient Features of ISO 8879: http://www.textuality.com/sgml-erb/dd-1996-0002.html

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Put to the Test: Nexaweb Enterprise Web Suite 2.0
Nelson King, Intelligent Enterprise

When you investigate Nexaweb Enterprise Web Suite 2.0, you get a sense
that it was created de novo by a group of smart people who studied the
requirements for building robust, rich-Internet-application-style
enterprise applications (like plenty of scalability, security, and data
access), and who considered the available standards and commonly used
tools (Java, JavaScript, Ajax, XML, SOA, etc.) They then set about piecing
together what they viewed as a simpler, consistent, mostly familiar, and
efficient whole. I tested the Nexaweb Platform in three server/hardware
configurations and found the installations to be smooth, requiring
surprisingly little post-install tweaking. Some of this is probably the
result of using standards, coupled with relatively tight control of
client, communication, and server. An interesting innovation is the use
of Nexaweb XML to first create the data presentation UI and then, through
a data framework plug-in, asynchronously handle the data going to or from
the client. Ajax works this way and users find the approach more
responsive. The data framework approach supports a wide variety of
external data handlers in JSP, JSTL, Struts, XSTL, or MVC. Pre-built
components are geared to Web 2.0, rich Internet application, SOA and
mobile applications. Nexaweb includes the Internet Messaging Bus (IMB) as
its way of providing these features and guaranteeing reliable messaging.
Nexaweb keeps it simple, for example riding the http channel through port
80 so that it can be instantly compatible with most firewalls. Nexaweb
supports a Universal Client Framework -- which, despite the name, isn't
all things to all developers, but it does make it possible for developers
who prefer Java, JavaScript, or Ajax to work on Nexaweb apps. The hitch
is that they must learn Nexaweb's declarative language, NXML (Nexaweb XML),
to produce the UI and wrap the other code. In Nexaweb's case the DOM
(Document Object Model) houses the NXML and provides the commands for
the local browser.

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/channels/enterprise_applications/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206402157

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Open-Source Movement Turns 10
Peter Galli, eWEEK

The past decade has been marked by enormous achievements and some serious
setbacks, says Bruce Perens, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative.
This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of the "Open
Source Definition" and the public announcement of the formation of the
Open Source Initiative. The decade has been marked both by enormous
achievements and serious setbacks. "This was the first time that the
general public heard what open source was about. Friday, February 8 is
the last day of Decade Zero of open source, while Saturday, February 9
is the anniversary of open source and the start of Decade One. It's a
computer scientist thing. We always start counting from zero," said
Bruce Perens, creator of the Open Source Definition and co-founder of
the Open Source Initiative. While acknowledging the trailblazing role
of Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, Perens
also acknowledged the conflict that has existed between open-source and
free-software evangelism. "I always intended to have open source be
another way of talking about free software, tailored to the ears of
business people, that would eventually lead them to a greater
appreciation of Richard Stallman's arguments on that front. This has
come to pass, and I hope you'll continue to make it so," Perens said
in a blog posting. From the blog: "We have actually changed the way
that innovation happens. Innovation has gone public. Many companies,
institutions, and individuals share innovation on a daily basis,
entirely in the open, through Free Software development communities.
The products they produce are the leaders in their field. Public
innovation eliminates the high transaction costs of lawyers, lawsuits
and licensing. It focuses on building a fertile community across the
market for idea creation and utilization rather than dividing the
market for the direct monetization of ideas as property. This is the
economically most efficient approach for most companies."

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Open-Source-Movement-Turns-10/
See also Bruce Perens' blog: http://perens.com/works/articles/State8Feb2008/

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Do We Really Need Structured Document Formats?
Eric Armstrong, Blog

Do we really need structured document formats? Structured document
formats like DITA, DocBook, and Solbook are characterized by deeply
nested tags and a multitude of schema constraints. Unstructured
tagging languages like HTML, on the other hand, are wide open. In one
meeting, every reason we came up with that made them seem necessary,
was answered by a convincing counter argument. "Reuse" would seem to
be the most important reason. And maybe there are some compelling
cases. But maybe all-out reuse isn't needed. Maybe we really only
need a very restricted form that solves those cases. In at least the
case of version-dimension reuse, variable substitution and conditional
metadata seem to be a darn good idea. And in at least the case of
table and list tags, nesting seems to be a requirement. So it's clearly
not the case that we can completely do without such capabilities. On
the other hand, the counter arguments against other forms of variable
substitution and conditional metadata remain intact -- at times, it is
just too costly to keep them working, especially in an environment that
changes frequently. And nesting everything may well be overkill, when
so few forms of nesting are actually indispensable. This post summarizes
the arguments we considered. Do they demolish the case for structured
documents in a highly fluid setting like the software industry? Do they
demolish the case for structured documents and reuse? Are they wrong
in some important respect? Or do they overlook some vitally important
point that makes structured document formats irreplacable?

http://blogs.sun.com/coolstuff/entry/do_we_really_need_structured

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WSO2 Joining Open-Source SOA Registry Field
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Featuring SOA governance and Web 2.0 collaboration capabilities, WSO2
Registry offers a repository for storing information and a registry for
locating it. A Web-based interface is included along with Web 2.0 features
like tags, ratings, and comments systems. Users can store and manage
enterprise metadata in a wiki-style model. WSO2's structured repository
supports XML and SOA metadata formats along with arbitrary data, such
as Microsoft Office documents, images, files, and text formats. A
catalog of enterprise information can be built that includes services,
service descriptions, employee data, and ongoing projects. "It's a
registry and repository product, so it basically organizes and lets you
store in a versioned and REST-compatible way all the SOA metadata that
happens to be in your enterprise," said Glen Daniels, director of Java
platforms at WSO2. Metadata can include service descriptions, XML schemas,
and configuration data. The company follows MuleSource in announcing an
open-source registry and repository for SOA. According to the announcement:
"The WSO2 Registry supports several usage scenarios. First, it can be
embedded in any Java application that needs a registry and repository
to store resources with Web 2.0-style features for commenting, tagging
and rating those resources. Second, it offers a REST-style Web API that
allows the WSO2 Registry to be used remotely from any application from
any language, including Java, PHP, C++, and Javascript. The Web API is
built on the popular Atom and AtomPub protocols, allowing any feed reader
(such as Google Reader or Bloglines reader) to browse the contents of
the Registry. Finally, the WSO2 Registry comes with an attractive
AJAX-powered user interface, which allows it to be used as a Web
application by both business and technical users alike. The product can
be used with the embedded database or be configured to use an existing
database such as MySQL, Oracle or SQLServer..."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/02/08/soa-wso2_1.html
See also the announcement: http://wso2.com/about/news/registry-1-0-release/

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W3C's Excessive DTD Traffic
Gerald Oskoboiny and Ted Guild, W3C Systems Team Blog

If you view the source code of a typical web page, you are likely to
see something like this near the top: " [statements] refer to HTML DTDs and namespace documents hosted on W3C's
site. Note that these are not hyperlinks; these URIs are used for
identification. This is a machine-readable way to say "this is HTML".
In particular, software does not usually need to fetch these resources,
and certainly does not need to fetch the same one over and over! Yet we
receive a surprisingly large number of requests for such resources: up
to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth
usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven't changed in years. The vast
majority of these requests are from systems that are processing various
types of markup (HTML, XML, XSLT, SVG) and in the process doing something
like validating against a DTD or schema. Handling all these requests
costs us considerably: servers, bandwidth and human time spent analyzing
traffic patterns and devising methods to limit or block excessive new
request patterns. We would much rather use these assets elsewhere, for
example improving the software and services needed by W3C and the Web
Community. You might think something like "don't request the same
resource thousands of times a day, especially when it explicitly tells
you it should be considered fresh for 90 days" would be obvious, but
unfortunately it seems not. At the W3C Systems Team's request the W3C
TAG has agreed to take up the issue of "Scalability of URI Access to
Resources."

http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dtd_traffic
See also the XML Catalogs standard: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/14809/xml-catalogs.html

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The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends
Sandy Kemsley, CMP Process Management Forum

Speaking at this week's Gartner BPM Summit in Las Vegas, Jay Simons,
VP of Marketing for BEA, presented the company's recent research results
on the state of the BPM market, including a survey of 200-plus BEA
customers, mostly IT people but spread across vertical markets and
geographies. They've also gathered information through their online BPM
Lifecycle Assessment. The results show a number of interesting trends
indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their
processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their
ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI over the
next three years. (1) IT embraces BPM enterprisewide, which broadens the
scope for BPM beyond the existing departmental systems, and centralizes
the practices around BPM. In general, this is occurring because of the
ability of BPM to connect applications into improved business processes;
more than half already are or will be connecting BPM and SOA in their
environment. (2) BPM is becoming event-driven, in order to support the
event-driven nature of business today. This will result in much more
agile processes that can respond to both expected and unexpected events.
(3) Increased focus on knowledge-intensive processes, and using
collaborative BPM to enable ad hoc processes both on their own or as an
offshoot from a structured process... (4) Enterprise social computing:
introducing tagging, wiki, social connectedness and the like with more
traditional process management in order to add context and more easily
collaborate. (5) Moving towards dynamic business applications; Yvonne
Genovese spoke in this keynote about the move towards dynamic/composite
applications in order to free organizations from the pre-canned logic
in packaged enterprise applications, but BPM, together with services
exposed in an SOA layer, allows for the fast assembly of applications
that are more suited to current business needs.

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2008/02/the_state_of_th.html

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

New OASIS Standard: XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) v1.2

OASIS has announced the approval of the XML Localization Interchange
File Format (XLIFF) specification Version 1.2 as an OASIS Standard. The
specification was produced by members of the OASIS XML Localisation
Interchange File Format (XLIFF) Technical Committee. The purpose of the
XLIFF vocabulary is to store localizable data and carry it from one step
of the localization process to the other, while allowing interoperability
between tools. The specification is tool-neutral, supports the entire
localization process, and supports common software, document data formats,
and markup languages. The specification provides an extensibility
mechanism to allow the development of tools compatible with an
implementer's data formats and workflow requirements. The extensibility
mechanism provides controlled inclusion of information not defined in
the specification. The XLIFF file format serves as a container for
externalized data to be interchanged between software publishers,
documentation writers (including, but not limited to documents written
in DITA, Docbook, HTML, and other XML document formats), localization
tools, and software services providers in order to facilitate all the
phases of the localization process.

http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2008-02-11-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
SAP AG http://www.sap.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

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