password
username
Sponsored by CakeMail, an email marketing software
Newsletter preview


XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 20 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
SAP AG http://www.sap.com
====================================================

HEADLINES:

* ISO News: Ballot Resolution Meeting on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 Standard
* ODF Standard Editor Calls for Cooperation with OOXML
* Oracle Mixes Extreme Transaction Processing with SOA
* Infiniflow: Distributed Application Server Based on OSGi and SCA
* XML 2.0? No, Seriously.
* Lessig Considers Running for Congress

----------------------------------------------------------------------

ISO News: Ballot Resolution Meeting on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 Standard
Staff, International Organization for Standardization Announcement

National delegations from thirty-seven (37) countries will be
participating in a ballot resolution meeting in Geneva, Switzerland,
on 25-29 February 2008 on the draft international standard "ISO/IEC
DIS 29500, Information Technology -- Office Open XML File Formats."
ISO/IEC DIS 29500 is a proposed standard for word-processing documents,
presentations and spreadsheets that is intended to be implemented by
multiple applications on multiple platforms. According to the
submitters of the document, one of its objectives is to ensure the
long-term preservation of documents created over the last two decades
using programmes that are becoming incompatible with continuing
advances in the field of information technology. The objective of the
ballot resolution meeting (BRM) will be to review and seek consensus
on possible modifications to the document in light of the comments
received along with votes cast during a five-month ballot on the draft
which ended on 2 September 2007... No decision on publication will be
taken at the meeting itself. Following the BRM, the 87 national member
bodies that voted in the 2 September ballot will have 30 days (until
29 March 2008) to examine the actions taken in response to the comments
and to reconsider their vote if they wish. If the modifications proposed
are such that national bodies then wish to withdraw their negative
votes, or turn abstentions into positive votes, and the acceptance
criteria are then met, the standard may proceed to publication. The
BRM is being organized by subcommittee SC 34, Document description and
processing languages, of the joint technical committee JTC 1, Information
technology. JTC 1 is one of the most experienced and productive of ISO
and IEC technical committees, having developed some 2 150 widely and
globally used international standards and related documents.
Approximately 4 200 comments were received during last year's ballot.
By grouping and by eliminating redundancies, these have been edited by
SC 34 experts down to 1100 comments for processing during the five
days of the BRM. The task will be carried out by 120 participants who
have registered for the meeting. They comprise members of the 37
national delegations, plus representatives of Ecma International, the
computer manufacturers' association that submitted ISO/IEC DIS 29500
for adoption by JTC 1, plus officers of the ISO/IEC Information
Technology Task Force (ITTF) which is responsible for the planning and
coordination of JTC 1 work.

http://xml.coverpages.org/BRM-DIS-29500.html
See also the Meeting Agenda: http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0933draft-rev2.htm

----------------------------------------------------------------------

ODF Standard Editor Calls for Cooperation with OOXML
Peter Sayer, InfoWorld

The teams developing ODF (OpenDocument Format) and OOXML (Office Open
XML) standards should work together, evolving the two in parallel, the
editor of the ODF standard said Tuesday in an open letter to the
standards-setting community. The Microsoft-sponsored OOXML document
format is just days away from a critical meeting that will influence
whether the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will
adopt it as a standard as its rival ODF was adopted in May 2006.
Relations between supporters of the two formats are, for the most part,
combative rather than cordial. Patrick Durusau, ISO project editor for
ODF, or ISO/IEC 26300 as it is known there, thinks supporters of the
two formats would be more productive if they allowed the formats to
co-evolve, he wrote in his open letter . Durusau thoughtfully avoided
the ODF and OOXML formats for his letter, choosing instead PDF, itself
adopted as an ISO standard in December. From Durusau's "Co-Evolving
OpenXML And OpenDocument Format": "If we had a co-evolutionary environment,
one where the proponents of OpenXML and OpenDocument, their respective
organizations, national bodies and others interested groups could meet
to discuss the future of those proposals, the future revisions of both
would likely be quite different. Co-evolution means that the standards
will evolve based on the influence of each other and their respective
user communities. Both remain completely independent and neither is
subordinate to the other. What is currently lacking is a neutral forum
in which proponents can meet and learn from each other. Creating such
an environment is going to take time and effort so I would like to
suggest a first step towards fostering co-evolution between OpenXML
and OpenDocument..."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/02/20/ODF-standard-editor-calls-for-cooperation-with-OOXML_1.html
See also the open letter: http://www.durusau.net/publications/co-evolution.pdf

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Oracle Mixes Extreme Transaction Processing with SOA
Rich Seeley, SearchSOA.com

Extreme transaction processing (XTP) is being added to complex event
processing (CEP) in service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations
for the financial services industry, explains David Chappell, vice
president and chief technologist for SOA at Oracle Corp. Chappell:
"What we're seeing is that SOA coupled with a class of applications
coined as extreme transaction processing or XTP is the future for
financial services infrastructure. So IT continues to be seen as the
enabler. We've seen some supporting data from Gartner/DataQuest that
IT spending in financial services is going to reach $566 billion by
2010. Where SOA comes into the picture is that it enables IT to deliver
new business services faster, while leveraging existing systems. At
the same time the financial institutions are pushing limits that require
more processing capability yet at the same time they don't want to see
an exponential rise in their investment in hardware. So the extreme
transaction processing class of applications has been most notably seen
in areas such as fraud detection, risk computation and stock trade
resolution... What XTP does is allow transactions to occur in memory
and not against the backend systems directly due to the need for extremely
fast response rates, but still including transactional integrity. So
think of classes of applications that need to handle large volumes of
data that need to be absorbed, correlated and acted upon. Typically
that data processed by XTP applications comes in the form of large
numbers of events and usually represents data that changes frequently...
once the pattern matching engine, whether it's built directly into the
XTP application itself or is identified by the complex event processing
engine, is it identifies an event of significance such as ATM withdrawal
fraud. Say for example your ATM card is used in different ATM machines
or is used to make purchases in three or four states or even different
countries within a matter of minutes, that's usually a flag that some
kind of fraud is going on. Once that kind of a situation is detected
then an SOA process in BPEL can be kicked off to make the proper
notification, send alerts to Business Activity Monitoring dashboards...

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/interview/0,289202,sid26_gci1299207,00.html
See also Part 2: http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/interview/0,289202,sid26_gci1299416,00.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Infiniflow: Distributed Application Server Based on OSGi and SCA
Ryan Slobojan, InfoQueue

Paremus recently released version 1.2 of Infiniflow, a next-generation
distributed application server based on OSGi and SCA. Paremus Marketing
Manager Andrew Rowney explained that Infiniflow was based upon OSGi and
SCA, and that it follows an application server paradigm -- a component
is written as a series of OSGi modules, it is linked to external
services through the SCA bindings, and Infiniflow provides life-cycle
management, monitoring, scaling and fault-recovery for any application
deployed on it. Rowney also described some best practices for application
development with Infiniflow: To take advantage of the full capabilities
of Infiniflow, an application needs to be presented as a composite
application rather than a single runtime entity, with different parts
of the processing requirements being handled in separate components
(OSGi bundles). A good example is where a part of the composite
application contains an intensive calculation that can be run in parallel
to reduce the overall processing time. For this type of applications the
developer is able to specify that Infiniflow should duplicate the bundle
that runs the calculation, instantiating as many copies as possible in
order to calculate the final result as quickly as possible... Infiniflow
itself is built using OSGi, and wired together using SCA System
descriptions. It has a Model-Driven Architecture: to reduce operational
complexity, application runtimes can only be modified through their SCA
System descriptor, and all interactions with the descriptor are secured
and audited An Infiniflow Service Fabric consists of a number of
Infiniflow containers -- OSGi-enabled JVM's -- which are able to
dynamically install/start/stop/uninstall code packaged in the OSGi
bundles referenced from the SCA System document...

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/02/infiniflow-12

----------------------------------------------------------------------

XML 2.0? No, Seriously.
Norm Walsh, Blog

Maybe its madness to consider XML 2.0 seriously. The cost of deployment
would be significant. Simultaneously convincing a critical mass of
users to switch without turning the design process into a farce would
be very difficult. And yet, the alternatives look a little like madness
too. I found three topics on my desk simultaneously last week: (1) The
proposal to amend the character set of XML 1.0 identifiers by erratum.
(2) the proposal to deploy CURIEs, an awkward, confusing extension of
the QName concept. (3) A thread of discussion suggesting that we consider
allowing prefix undeclaration in Namespaces in XML 1.0. That's right 1.0.
We're in an odd place. XML has been more successful, and in more and
more different arenas, than could have been imagined. But... XML 1.0
is seriously broken in the area of internationalization, one of its
key strengths, because it hasn't kept pace with changes to Unicode.
QNames, originally designed as a way of creating qualified element
and attribute names have also been used in more and more different
arenas than could have been imagined. Unfortunately, the constraints
that make sense for XML element and attribute names, don't make sense,
are unacceptable, in many of the other arenas. And in XML, we learned
that it is sometimes useful to be able to take a namespace binding out
of scope. XML 1.1 addressed some of these concerns, but also introduced
backwards incompatibilities. Those incompatibilities seemed justified
at the time, although they seem so obviously unnecessary and foolish
now. In short, we botched our opportunity to fix the problem 'right'.
What to do? ... Perhaps, dare I say it, it is time to consider XML 2.0
instead. Trouble is, if XML 2.0 gets spun up as an open-ended design
exercise, it'll be crushed by the second-system effect. And if XML 2.0
gets spun up as 'only' a simplification of XML 1.0, it won't get any
traction. If XML 2.0 is to be a success, it has to offer enough in the
way of new functionality to convince people with successful XML 1.0
deployments (that's everyone, right?) that it's worth switching. At the
same time, it has to be about the same size and shape as XML 1.0 when
it's done or it'll be perceived as too big, too complicated, too much
work. With that in mind, here are some candidate requirements for XML
2.0...

http://norman.walsh.name/2008/02/20/xml20

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Lessig Considers Running for Congress
Grant Gross, ComputerWorld

Lawrence Lessig, the cyberlaw author and advocate for free software and
online civil liberties, is considering a run for the U.S. Congress, he
announced on his blog Wednesday. Lessig, author of books such as "Free
Culture" and "Code 2.0," would run for the open House of Representatives
seat in California created by the death of Representative Tom Lantos,
a Democrat, earlier this month. A "draft Lessig" movement has popped
up online since Lantos died. Lessig said he plans to make the decision
about whether to run by about March 1, 2008. "This is a very difficult
decision," he wrote on his blog. "Thank you to everyone who has tried
to help -- both through very strong words of encouragement and very,
very strong words to dissuade. Lessig, a self-described progressive,
would run as part of his Change Congress campaign. The Stanford University
law professor announced in January that he would shift his focus to
political corruption and away from free software and free culture. He
called on lawmakers to stop accepting money from political action
committees and lobbyists, and to stop adding so-called earmarks for
special projects in appropriation legislation. Politicians need to
change "how Washington works" and to end a culture of corruption that's
based on political contributions, he said in a video at Lessig08.org.
"You know about this corruption in Washington, a corruption that doesn't
come from evil people, a corruption that comes from good people working
in a bad system," he said in the video. Progressives should work to
change the way money influences decisions in Washington, he said, "not
because this is, in some sense, the most important problem, but because
it is the first problem that has to be solved if we're going to address
these more fundamental problems later." Lessig is the founder of the
Creative Commons, which attempts to give copyright holders additional
options for licensing their work beyond all rights reserved. Lessig
has served on the boards of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9063661
See also Creative Commons references: http://xml.coverpages.org/creativeCommons.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------

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

----------------------------------------------------------------------

XML Daily Newslink: http://xml.coverpages.org/newsletter.html
Newsletter archive: http://xml.coverpages.org/newsletterArchive.html
Newsletter subscribe: newsletter-subscribe@xml.coverpages.org
Newsletter ***: newsletter-***@xml.coverpages.org
Newsletter help: newsletter-help@xml.coverpages.org
Cover Pages: http://xml.coverpages.org/

----------------------------------------------------------------------