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XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 20 March 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
SAP AG http://www.sap.com
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HEADLINES:

* Liberty Alliance Web Services Framework: A Technical Overview
* XML Base (Second Edition) Issued as a Proposed Edited Recommendation
* Addressing Doubts about REST
* Microsoft Working with Eclipse on Vista, ID Links
* OAI4J Open Source Client Library Supports OAI Metadata Specifications
* First Look: Safari 3.1 Adds Speed and HTML 5 Features
* Google Sees Surge in Web Use on Hot Mobile Phones

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Liberty Alliance Web Services Framework: A Technical Overview
Conor Cahill, Carolina Canales (et al.), Liberty Technical Report

This overview document enumerates the major features of Liberty Web
Services, a framework for identity-based services that provides added
value for identity, security, and privacy above and beyond basic web
services, and thereby makes identity data portable across domains. The
term Liberty Web Services comprises the Identity Web Services Framework
(ID-WSF) and the Identity Service Interface Specifications (ID-SIS) that
take advantage of that framework. Together, these two pieces enable
identity-based services -- web services associated with the identity
attributes of individual users. Why are identity-based services valuable?
Fundamentally, because they enable a user's identity data to be portable
across the many Web applications that, if able to access these attributes,
can provide a more customized and meaningful experience to the user,
whilst removing from that user the burden of manually repeatedly
providing and managing their identity attributes at each. ID-WSF builds
on many existing standards for networking and distributed computing, and
adds specialized capabilities for handling identity-related information
and tasks and for ensuring privacy and security. With ID-WSF providing
the addressing, security and privacy plumbing -- different ID-SIS
specifications define the specific syntax and semantics for sharing
different slices of your identity attributes. For instance, a Calendar
SIS specifies how the travel service would query the user's Calendar
Service for free blocks, or write an event. Other ID-SIS specifications
either already exist or can be defined for other aspects of your
identity, e.g., The user's personal profile, geolocation, presence, or
wallet... An identity-based service is a web service associated with a
particular user, i.e., a web service at which a user's calendar
information can be accessed. Identity-based services require
functionality beyond that necessary for basic web services not associated
with a given user -- particularly in the areas of identity, security, and
privacy. Liberty ID-WSF specifications define the addressing, security
and privacy plumbing -- and different Liberty ID-SIS specifications define
the specific syntax and semantics for sharing different slices of identity
attributes. Together, ID-WSF and ID-SIS make identity data portable in a
secure and privacy-respecting manner.

http://www.projectliberty.org/liberty/content/download/4120/27687/file/idwsf-intro-v1.0.pdf
See also Eve Maler's blog: http://www.xmlgrrl.com/blog/archives/2008/03/19/new-resource-on-identity-based-services/

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XML Base (Second Edition) Issued as a Proposed Edited Recommendation
Jonathan Marsh and Richard Tobin (eds), W3C Technical Report

Members of the W3C XML Core Working Group have published a Proposed
Edited Recommendation for "XML Base (Second Edition)." The document
describes a facility, similar to that of HTML BASE, for defining base
URIs for parts of XML documents. As a Proposed Edited Recommendation
(PER), this second edition is not a new version of XML Base: its
purpose is to clarify a number of issues that have become apparent
since the first edition was published. Some of these were first published
as separate errata, others were published in a public editor's draft in
November 2006, and in December 2006. BASE allows authors to explicitly
specify a document's base URI for the purpose of resolving relative
URIs in links to external images, applets, form-processing programs,
style sheets, and so on. The document describes a mechanism for
providing base URI services to XLink, but as a modular specification
so that other XML applications benefiting from additional control over
relative URIs but not built upon XLink can also make use of it. The
syntax consists of a single XML attribute named 'xml:base'. The
specification does not give the 'xml:base' attribute any special status
as far as XML validity is concerned. In a valid document the attribute
must be declared in the DTD, and similar considerations apply to other
schema languages. The deployment of XML Base is through normative
reference by new specifications, for example XLink and the XML Infoset.
Applications and specifications built upon these new technologies will
natively support XML Base. The behavior of 'xml:base' attributes in
applications based on specifications that do not have direct or indirect
normative reference to XML Base is undefined. It is expected that a
future RFC for XML Media Types will specify XML Base as the mechanism
for establishing base URIs in the media types it defines. A companion
document "Testing XML Base Conformance" from the W3C XML Core Working
Group is also available. While "XML Base" does not specify an interface
for determining the base URI of a node in an XML document, various other
specifications directly or indirectly refer normatively to XML Base,
and provide mechanisms by which the results of XML Base processing can
be determined. Some of these specifications have test suites that
include XML Base tests.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/PER-xmlbase-20080320/
See also the HTML version with diff markup: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/PER-xmlbase-20080320/Overview-review.html

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Addressing Doubts about REST
Stefan Tilkov, InfoQueue

Invariably, learning about REST means that you'll end up wondering just
how applicable the concept really is for your specific scenario. And
given that you're probably used to entirely different architectural
approaches, it's only natural that you start doubting whether REST, or
rather RESTful HTTP, really works in practice, or simply breaks down
once you go beyond introductory, 'Hello, World'-level stuff. In this
article, I will try to address ten of the most common doubts people have
about REST when they start exploring it, especially if they have a strong
background in the architectural approach behind SOAP/WSDL-based Web
services. (1) REST may be usable for CRUD, but not for 'real' business
logic. (2) There is no formal contract/no description language. (3) Who
would actually want to expose so much of their application's
implementation internals? (4) REST works with HTTP only, it's not
transport protocol independent. (5) There is no practical, clear and
consistent guidance on how to design RESTful applications. (6) REST does
not support transactions. (7) REST is unreliable. (8) No pub/sub support:
REST is fundamentally based on a client-server model, and HTTP always
refers to a client and a server as the endpoints of communication. A
client interacts with a server by sending requests and receiving
responses. In a pub/sub model, an interested party subscribes to a
particular category of information and gets notified each time something
new appears. How could pub/sub be supported in a RESTful HTTP
environment? We don't have to look far to see a perfect example of
this: it's called syndication, and RSS and Atom Syndication are examples
of it. A client queries for new information by issuing an HTTP against
a resource that represents the collection of changes, e.g. for a
particular category or time interval. This would be extremely inefficient,
but isn't, because GET is the most optimized operation on the Web. In
fact, you can easily imagine that a popular weblog server would have
scale up much more if it had to actively notify each subscribed client
individually about each change. Notification by polling scales extremely
well... (9) No asynchronous interactions. (10) Lack of tools: -- vendors
are coming up with more and more (supposedly) easier and better support
for RESTful HTTP development in their frameworks, e.g. Sun with JAX-RS
(JSR 311) or Microsoft with the REST support in .NET 3.5 or the ADO.NET
Data Services Framework... Is REST, and its most common implementation,
HTTP, perfect? Of course not. Nothing is perfect, definitely not for
every scenario, and most of the time not even for a single scenario.
I've completely ignored a number of very reasonable problem areas that
require more complicated answers, for example message-based security,
partial updates and batch processing, and I solemnly promise to address
these in a future installment.

nla_internal_2655581.jpg also 'A Brief Introduction to REST': http://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-introduction

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Microsoft Working with Eclipse on Vista, ID Links
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Microsoft's much-anticipated revelations about collaborations with the
Eclipse Foundation Wednesday did not include joining the open-source
tools foundation. But the two organizations are working together to
enable use of Eclipse technology to build Java applications for Windows
Vista. Also, Microsoft and Eclipse are collaborating on identity
management via linking Eclipse's Higgins Project with Microsoft's
CardSpace technology. Microsoft's efforts were detailed by Sam Ramji,
Microsoft director of platform technology strategy, at the EclipseCon
2008 conference in Santa Clara, California. Ramji guided the audience
through a list of efforts Microsoft has made in the open-source world,
such as accommodations for PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), JBoss, and
Novell's Xen hypervisor. Ramji also said Microsoft itself has 200 projects
hosted on its CodePlex open-source hosting site. Microsoft traditionally
has been viewed as the anti-open-source company, but Ramji spared no
detail looking to refute this notion, listing a myriad of projects
undertaken over the years: "Today, we're architecting our participation
in the open-source world." The Java enablement effort for Vista involves
collaboration on an SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) to work with Microsoft's
WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) technology for graphical presentation.
This will enable Java to be used an authoring language to write
WPF-enabled applications. Ramji wrote in his blog: "... the CardSpace
team at Microsoft was already working actively with the Higgins Project
to establish a secure, interoperable framework for user identity on the
web -- an architecture known as the Identity Metasystem. Since the
inception of Higgins, the CardSpace team has worked very closely with
the Higgins team, providing them the protocol documentation they needed
to be able to build an identity selector that is interoperable with
CardSpace, as well as placing those protocol specifications under the
OSP so that they knew that it was safe to do so. We share a commitment
to building a user-centric, privacy-preserving, secure, easy-to-use
identity layer for the Internet..."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/19/Microsoft-working-with-Eclipse-on-Vista-ID-links_1.html
See also Sam Ramji's blog 'Supernova': http://port25.technet.com/archive/2008/03/19/supernova.aspx

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OAI4J Open Source Client Library Supports OAI Metadata Specifications
Oskar Grenholm, Software Announcement

Software developers at the National Library of Sweden have announced the
release of OAI4J, a client library for OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE written in
Java, as Open Source. The project is hosted on SourceForge. OAI-PMH
(The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) provides
an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata
harvesting, where a "record" is returned in an XML-encoded byte stream
in response to an OAI-PMH request for metadata from an item. Object Reuse
and Exchange (OAI-ORE) specifications allow distributed repositories to
exchange information about their constituent digital objects. These
specifications include approaches for representing digital objects and
repository services that facilitate access and ingest of these
representations. OAI4J has been released as Open Source under the Apache
License, version 2.0. Features for OAI-PMH: (1) convenient Java API that
lets you perform queries and handle the harvested data in an
object-oriented fashion; (2) it handles all the verbs and responses of
OAI-PMH. The OAI-ORE support: (3) lets you create and build Resource
Maps from scratch programmatically; (4) handles parsing of existing
Resource Maps written as Atom feeds; (5) allows Resource Map objects to
be serialized into Atom feeds; (6) can be extended to also handle RDF/XML
parsing/serialization. The SourceForge download site provides links for
a binary download, Java documentation for the API, and some examples to
get you started.

http://oai4j-client.sourceforge.net
See also the Open Archives Initiative: http://www.openarchives.org/

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First Look: Safari 3.1 Adds Speed and HTML 5 Features
Seth Weintraub, ComputerWorld

Now available also for Windows: Safari 3.1 is "The fastest web browser
on any platform, Safari loads pages up to 1.9 times faster than Internet
Explorer 7 and up to 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2... it executes
JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 4
times faster than Firefox 2." Apple released Safari 3.1 on March 18,
2008 with an updated rendering engine that makes the fastest Internet
browser even faster. On top of that, Apple's new browser includes some
features that reflect the future of the HTML 5 specification: offline
storage, media support, CSS animations, and Web fonts. Under the hood
Apple has made some significant changes that it has pulled from the
latest builds of the open-source WebKit engine. WebKit is the framework
version of the engine that's used by Safari. It is also the basis of the
Web browsing engine in iPhone's Mobile Safari, Symbian's browser, the
Google Android platform, and Adobe's new AIR platform. To check out how
well Safari 3.1 handles Web sites, I ran it through some popular standards
testing -- and found that it leads the pack. In the Acid3 Tests, which
were created by the Web Standards Project to test dynamic browser
capabilities, Safari 3.1 scored 75 out of 100, significantly higher than
the previous version of Safari and other shipping browsers (Firefox 3
Beta 4 scored 68, while the most recent WebKit scored 92). However, the
big news is how fast the new version of Safari is... One of the drawbacks
of Safari has been the perceived "over-smoothing" or softening of fonts
on the PC. While this hasn't been completely fixed, Apple's Safari 3.1
allows Web sites to specify fonts outside the seven Web-safe font families;
these new fonts can be downloaded by the browser as needed. Unfortunately,
there are still prominent features that are part of rival browsers that
Safari simply can't match. For example, Safari doesn't have all of the
add-ons that Firefox enjoys, such as the Google toolbar... With the 3.1
release, Safari has become the fastest browser you can use. If that isn't
enough reason to make a switch, its strong adherence to Web standards and
rapid adoption of new technologies might make you think again.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9069838
See also the product description: http://images.apple.com/safari/docs/Safari_Product_Overview.pdf

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Google Sees Surge in Web Use on Hot Mobile Phones
Staff, Reuters and CNET News.com

Google has seen an acceleration of Internet activity among mobile phone
users in recent months since the company introduced faster Web services
on selected phone models, fueling confidence the mobile Internet era is
at hand, the company said on Tuesday. Early evidence showing sharp
increases in Internet usage on phones, not just computers, has emerged
from services Google has begun offering in recent months on Blackberry
e-mail phones, Nokia devices for multimedia picture and video creators
and business professionals and the Apple iPhone... The growing
availability of flat-rate data plans from phone carriers instead of
per-minute charges that previously discouraged Internet use, along with
improved Web browsers on mobile phones as well as better-designed services
from companies like Google are fueling the growth. Google made the
pronouncement as it introduced a new software download for mobile phones
running Microsoft's Windows Mobile software that conveniently positions
a Google Web search window on the home screen of such phones. Similar
versions of the search software which Google introduced for BlackBerry
users in December and certain Nokia phones in February have sped up the
time users take to perform Web searches by 40 percent and, in turn, driven
usage. The software shortcuts the time it takes for people to perform Web
searches on Google by eliminating initial search steps of finding a Web
browser on the phone, opening the browser, waiting for network access,
and getting to Google.com. By making a Google search box more convenient,
mobile phone users have begun using the Internet more. Microsoft expects
to have sold 20 million Windows Mobile devices by the end of its fiscal
year in June, which together with Blackberry and Symbian-based phones
represent upward of 85 percent of the Internet-ready smartphones sold
in the world.

http://www.news.com/Google-sees-surge-in-Web-use-on-hot-mobile-phones/2100-1034_3-6234814.html

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