Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 21 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:

* W3C Last Call Working Draft: Cool URIs for the Semantic Web
* Quark Delves Into Publishing Workflow
* An Extensible Markup Language (XML) Configuration Access Protocol
(XCAP) Diff Event Package
* OpenLiberty-J Client Library for Liberty Web Services (ID-WSF 2.0)
* Demand for Interop Fuels J2EE, Microsoft Unity
* Opinion: WSO2 Mashup Server Takes First Steps

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W3C Last Call Working Draft: Cool URIs for the Semantic Web
Leo Sauermann and Richard Cyganiak (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C announced that members of the Semantic Web Education and Outreach
(SWEO) Interest Group have published the Last Call Working Draft for
"Cool URIs for the Semantic Web." The document is intended to become
a W3C Interest Group Note giving a tutorial explaining decisions of
the TAG for newcomers to Semantic Web technologies. It was initially
based on the DFKI Technical Memo TM-07-01 and was subsequently published
as a W3C Working Draft in December 2007; it was reviewed by the Technical
Architecture Group (TAG) and the Semantic Web Deployment Group (SWD).
The document is a practical guide for implementers of the RDF
specification. The title is inspired by Tim Berners-Lee's article "Cool
URIs don't change". It explains two approaches for RDF data hosted on
HTTP servers. Intended audiences are Web and ontology developers who
have to decide how to model their RDF URIs for use with HTTP. Applications
using non-HTTP URIs are not covered. The document is an informative guide
covering selected aspects of previously published, detailed technical
specifications. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) allows users
to describe both Web documents and concepts from the real world -- people,
organisations, topics, things -- in a computer-processable way. Publishing
such descriptions on the Web creates the Semantic Web. URIs (Uniform
Resource Identifiers) are very important, providing both the core of
the framework itself and the link between RDF and the Web. This document
presents guidelines for their effective use. It discusses two strategies,
called 303 URIs and hash URIs. It gives pointers to several Web sites
that use these solutions, and briefly discusses why several other
proposals have problems. It is important to understand that using URIs,
it is possible to identify both a thing (which exists outside of the web)
and a web document describing the thing. For example the person Alice
is described on her homepage. Bob may not like the look of the homepage,
but fancy the person Alice. So two URIs are needed, one for Alice, one
for the homepage or a RDF document describing Alice. The question is
where to draw the line between the case where either is possible and the
case where only descriptions are available. According to W3C guidelines
in "Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One," we have an Web
document (there called information resource) if all its essential
characteristics can be conveyed in a message. Examples are a Web page,
an image or a product catalog. The URI identifies both the entity and
indirectly the message that conveys the characteristics. In HTTP, a
status 200 response code should be sent when a Web document has been
accessed, a different setup is needed when publishing URIs that are
meant to identify entities.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-cooluris-20080321/
See also the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/

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Quark Delves Into Publishing Workflow
Joab Jackson, Government Computer News

Publishing software company Quark has introduced new software poised to
help tame increasingly unwieldy publishing production routines. Quark
announced the release of DPS earlier this month, at the AIIM
International Exposition and Conference in Boston. The newly released
Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution sets out to confront a growing
problem experienced by organizations that publish a lot of material --
that of keeping track of the material as it is used across different
media... Design publication tools such as Quark's QuarkXPress and
Adobe's InDesign have been ill-suited to reformat designed material
for the Web, so the process of moving printed material to the Web
tends to be a time-consuming and sometimes still manual process.
According to the product description: "Quark Dynamic Publishing
Solution Quark DPS consists of multiple software components, including
desktop tools for creating content, and server-based technology for
automating publishing workflows. It is based on open standards to
allow for easy integration with enterprise content management systems
and other business applications. Dynamic publishing automates the
creation and delivery of information across multiple channels, from
print to Web, email and beyond. It allows users to create reusable
components of information that can be combined to create various types
of documents for any audience. Dynamic publishing automates the page
formatting process allowing for the production of print, Web, and
electronic content from a single source of information. Quark uses XML
(Extensible Markup Language) as the underlying data format for your
information because its capabilities line up perfectly with dynamic
publishing's requirements. XML lets you break down your information
into components of any size that may be useful. For example, an
article might include a title, subtitle, and body copy, which itself
might consist of a number of components such as paragraphs. Some of
those components may be reused across multiple articles or documents,
thereby enabling you to create a single source where one change can
update many documents. In addition, XML enforces the absolutely
consistent structure that makes automation possible. Without this
consistency, the only option would be to continue the labor-intensive
effort of hand-crafting pages indefinitely. XML allows information to
exist independently of its formatting. By applying formatting separately,
through an automated process, XML-based information can easily be
published in multiple formats and multiple types of media..."

http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/45997-1.html
See also Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution (DPS) - 'Why XML': http://dynamicpublishing.quark.com/dps/why_xml.html

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An Extensible Markup Language (XML) Configuration Access Protocol
(XCAP) Diff Event Package
Jari Urpalainen (ed), IETF Internet Draft

This document describes an "xcap-diff" SIP event package, with the aid
of which clients can receive notifications of the partial changes of
Extensible Markup Language (XML) Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP)
resources. The initial synchronization and document updates are based
on using the XCAP-Diff format. XCAP (RFC 4825) is a protocol that
allows clients to manipulate XML documents stored on a server. These
XML documents serve as configuration information for application
protocols. As an example, RFC 4662 resource list subscriptions (also
known as presence lists) allow a client to have a single SIP subscription
to a list of users, where the list is maintained on a server. The server
will obtain presence for those users and report it back to the client.
Another specification, "Extensible Markup Language (XML) Document Format
for Indicating a Change in XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP)
Resources" defines a data format which can convey the fact that an XML
document managed by XCAP has changed. This data format is an XML document
format, called an XCAP diff document. This format can indicate that a
document has changed, and provide its previous and new entity tags. It
can also optionally include a set of patch operations which indicate
how to transform the document from the version prior to the change, to
the version after it. As defined in this XCAP Diff Event Package memo,
an "XCAP Component" is an XML element or an attribute, which can be
updated or retrieved with the XCAP protocol. "Aggregating" means that
while XCAP clients update only a single XCAP component at a time, several
of these modifications can be aggregated together with the XML-Patch-Ops
semantics. When a client starts an "xcap-diff" subscription it may not
be aware of all the individual XCAP documents it is subscribing to.
This can, for instance happen when a user subscribes to his/her
collection of a given XCAP Application Usage where several different
clients update the same XCAP documents. The initial notification can
give the list of these documents which the authenticated user is allowed
to read. The references and the strong ETag values of these documents
are shown so that a client can separately fetch the actual document
contents with the HTTP protocol. After these document retrievals, the
subsequent SIP notifications can contain patches to these documents by
using XML-Patch-Ops semantics. While the initial document synchronization
is based on separate HTTP retrievals of full documents, XML elements
or attributes can be received "in-band", that is straight within the
'xcap-diff' notification format.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-ietf-sip-xcapevent-01.txt
See also XCAP in RFC 4825: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4825.txt

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OpenLiberty-J Client Library for Liberty Web Services (ID-WSF 2.0)
Staff, OpenLiberty.org Announcement

OpenLiberty.org, the global open source community working to provide
developers with resources and support for building interoperable,
secure and privacy-respecting identity services, has announced the
release of OpenLiberty-J, an open source Liberty Web Services
(ID-WSF 2.0) client library designed to ease the development and
accelerate the deployment of secure, standards-compliant Web 2.0
Applications. OpenLiberty.org will hold a public webcast to review
OpenLiberty-J on April 2, 2008 at 8 am US PT. OpenLiberty-J enables
application developers to quickly and easily incorporate the
enterprise-grade security and privacy capabilities of the proven
interoperable Liberty Alliance Identity Web Services Framework into
identity consuming applications such as those found in enterprise
service oriented architectures (SOAs), Web 2.0 social networking
environments and client-based applications on PC's and mobile devices.
Released as beta today under the Apache 2.0 license, OpenLiberty-J
code is available for review and download at OpenLiberty.org.
OpenLiberty-J is based on J2SE, and open source XML, SAML, and web
services libraries from the Apache Software Foundation and Internet2,
including OpenSAML, a product of the Internet2 Shibboleth project. The
library implements the Liberty Advanced Client functionality of Liberty
Web Services standards. Developers can immediately begin using the
OpenLiberty-J code to build a wide range of new identity applications
that are secure and offer users a high degree of online privacy
protection. "With the release of OpenLiberty-J, developers now have a
comprehensive library of open source code to begin driving security
and privacy into applications requiring identity management
functionality," said Conor P. Cahill, Principal Engineer, Intel and
OpenLiberty-J contributor. "OpenLiberty.org encourages the global open
source community to begin working with the code and welcomes contributions
to further the evolution of OpenLiberty-J as the project moves from
beta to general availability later this year."

http://xml.coverpages.org/OpenLiberty-J-Announce.html
See also the OpenLiberty.org web site: http://www.openliberty.org/

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Demand for Interop Fuels J2EE, Microsoft Unity
Vance McCarthy, Integration Developer News

This article aims to give developers and architects an armchair tour
of the scope and depth of how J2EE leading vendors are working with
Microsoft to push the availability of next-gen interop technologies
and Best Practices. Last month's JavaOne put J2EE/.NET interop in the
spotlight like never before. Sun and Microsoft technical experts stood
together on a Moscone stage in San Francisco, and debuted co-developed
interop technologies for helping J2EE developers secure traffic between
J2EE and .NET platforms. If JavaOne is any indication, the fences
between J2EE and .NET are definitely coming down. Simon Guest, an interop
specialist and senior program manager on Microsoft's Architecture Strategy
Team, presented at JavaOne. Following Microsoft's Andrew Layman
co-keynote with Sun's Mark Hapner, Guest commented, "we got really good
applause from the audience. A lot of developers came by our booth to tell
us they were glad we were there, which was good to hear" -- the implication
being that Java users and developers are also telling Java vendors it's
OK to work closely with Microsoft on interop. J2EE/.NET interop is
'extremely important' to IBM customers, according to Jeff Jones, IBM's
director of strategy for information management software (IMS): "Customers
tell us that .NET has come more front and center for them, so our focus on
.NET interop has intensified. IBM and Microsoft] now have a jointly staffed
lab in Kirkland, Washington. At that lab, IBM has woven support into DB2
for .NET devs, and made great progress with our ability to interop with
Windows Server 2003 and the upcoming 2005 version... BEA is also
intensifying its interop programs with Microsoft, but their approach is
a bit different than Big Blue's. BEA execs say J2EE/.NET interop will be
key to providing better unified support for .NET and J2EE programming
models, making it easier for developers and architects to program in a
mixed environment. Earlier this spring, BEA introduced its AquaLogic
Service Bus, an abstraction layer designed to sit above Java/J2EE and
.NET environments... For Sun Microsystems there are very compelling
reasons to partner with Microsoft, and work to improve J2EE/.NET interop
tools and approaches. Customers of both companies are demanding
interoperability at all levels, but perhaps most importantly interop must
come with a unified security model. As Sun and Microsoft interop experts
joined together on the JavaONE stage, McNealy demonstrated a new interop
security standard, dubbed Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism
(MTOM). MTOM enables developers to send binary attachments between Java
and .NET using Web Services, while retaining the protections offered by
WS-* security and reliability specs...

http://www.idevnews.com/IntegrationNews.asp?ID=136

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Opinion: WSO2 Mashup Server Takes First Steps
Steven Nunez, ComputerWorld

Mashups (composite applications) promise the ability to easily create
useful new applications from existing services and Web applications.
By combining data from multiple sources across the Web, and from
within the enterprise, mashups can help distill important information
for people who would otherwise need to gather and distill it manually.
Composite applications in 2008 are in the "early adopter" phase, with
companies exploring their uses and potential in the enterprise. There's
no lack of entrants in the field; a quick search turned up at least 20
different mashup platforms, both commercial and open source. Products
such as JackBe Presto, Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite and Kapow's
RoboSuite illustrate the range of approaches. WSO2's Mashup Server is
aimed at Web developers seeking a complete environment for building,
deploying and administering composite applications. It's clear that
the WSO2 Mashup Server design team gave some thought to what such
developers would need to create mashups, and for those with an
understanding of JavaScript, XML, and AJAX, this toolset makes developing
mashups simple... Parsing XML in JavaScript is usually a difficult and
tedious task, but the inclusion of Mozilla's E4X (ECMAScript for XML)
makes parsing XML simpler. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) would be
a good alternative communication mechanism, and hopefully future versions
will include the option of returning JSON objects as well. Hosted Objects
are objects hosted within the WSO2 Mashup Server that provide access to
remote data sources. These objects are written in Java, and provide
access to APP (Atom Publishing Protocol) resources, RSS feeds, e-mail,
and instant messaging services (although only for sending messages),
among others. One of the more useful if more complicated hosted objects
is the "scraper" object, which makes use of Web-Harvest to screen scrape
Web pages that do not provide Web services. From the enterprise standpoint,
significant omissions are the lack of JMS and SQL hosted objects.
Creating the client side of the mashup is straightforward. Using the
generated JavaScript stubs, you simply need to include them in the Web
page that's consuming the service... Mooshup.com is a community of
mashup authors, where they can develop, share, discover, and run
Javascript-powered mashups. The site is powered by the WSO2 Mashup
Server, which is available as a free open source download.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9070538
See also the Mooshup.com developer community web site: http://mooshup.com/

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XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 21 March 2008