Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 25 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
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com
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HEADLINES:

* Web Technologies: SOA What?
* Developing International Standards for Very Small Enterprises
* Google, MySpace, Yahoo Forge OpenSocial Foundation
* Getting Started with XAML in Silverlight
* E-Discovery Guru Not Yet Wed to XML
* Workflow Resource Patterns as a Tool to Support OASIS BPEL4People
Standardization Efforts
* BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask Get Reference Implementation
* New Release: OpenUDDI Server Version 0.9.7
* The Frog Race: The Desire for Control and How Large Companies Interact
With Standards Organizations

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Web Technologies: SOA What?
Michael J. Carey, IEEE Computer

Why is the enterprise software industry all abuzz about SOA? The SOA
world has recently begun to realize that SOA applications are ultimately
still just applications. Data services are thus an important class of
services that warrant explicit consideration in designing, building, and
maintaining SOA applications. Those of us who grew up in the "preaSOAic"
era will quickly notice that something is missing from [typical SOA
diagrams]: a data model associated with the application. To use a simple
analogy, services provide operations that are akin to verbs -- the
business actions available to application developers. Missing are the
nouns -- the data entities. By focusing only on business processes and
services, the basic SOA model misses what the actions are about. In
addition, business processes often need access to information. While
some middleware software vendors have been making data service noises
for several years, a survey of current information-integration vendor
offerings reveals an emerging consensus that data services will play a
key role in SOA applications. BEA Systems, Composite Software, IBM,
Microsoft, Red Hat, and Xcalia are among the growing list of companies
seeking to make data services easier to build and maintain with recent
or forthcoming products. In addition to service-enabling data, most such
products include data-integration capabilities that provide uniform,
service-oriented access to otherwise disparate data types and data
sources. Is SOA the next wave or a passing fad? Several signs point to
a lasting future for SOA. A range of organizations and companies are
pursuing SOA initiatives today, and the emerging SaaS trend suggests
that future enterprises' business processes will commonly orchestrate
services residing both in-house and across the Web. And what about data
services -- are they for real? Because data will always be central to
applications, it's likely that data services will "stick" in the SOA
world. Consequently, systems that make building and managing data
services easier will become an increasingly significant piece of the
enterprise information integration puzzle. Moreover, data-service
modeling will become a design discipline in need of sound new
methodologies and supporting tools.

http://tinyurl.com/yo4ge4
See also IEEE Computer Magazine: http://www.computer.org/computer/

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Developing International Standards for Very Small Enterprises
C. Laporte, S. Alexandre, A. Renault; IEEE Computer

Industry recognizes that very small enterprises (VSEs) contribute
valuable products and services. In Europe, for example, 85 percent of
the IT sector's companies have only one to 10 employees. According to
a recent survey, 78 percent of software development enterprises in the
Montreal area have fewer than 25 employees, while 50 percent have fewer
than 10. Studies and surveys confirm that current software engineering
standards do not address the needs of these organizations, especially
those with a low capability level. Compliance with standards such as
those from ISO and the IEEE is difficult if not impossible for them to
achieve. Subsequently, VSEs have no or very limited ways to be recognized
as enterprises that produce quality software systems in their domain.
Therefore, they are often cut off from some economic activities. To
rectify some of these difficulties, delegates from five national bodies
of the 2004 International Organization for Standardization/International
Electrotechnical Commission Joint Technical Committee 1/Sub Committee
7 (SC7) plenary meeting in Australia reached a consensus regarding the
necessity of providing VSEs with standards adapted to their size and
particular context, including a set of profiles and guides... VSEs
express the need for assistance to adopt and implement standards. More
than 62 percent would like more guidance with examples, and 55 percent
asked for lightweight and easy-to-understand standards, complete with
templates. Finally, the respondents indicated that it must be possible
to implement standards with minimum cost, time, and resources. In 2005,
at the SC7 Plenary meeting in Finland, Thailand proposed the creation
of a new working group to meet these objectives. Twelve countries voted
in favor of establishing such a group, named Working Group 24 (WG24).
WG24 used the concept of ISO profiles (ISP: International Standardized
Profile) to develop the new standard for VSEs. A profile is defined as
'a set of one or more base standards and/or ISPs, and, where applicable,
the identification of chosen classes, conforming subsets, options and
parameters of those base standards, or ISPs necessary to accomplish a
particular function'. [One approach involves production of] guidelines
explaining in more detail the processes outlined in the profile. These
guidelines will be published as ISO technical reports and should be
freely accessible to VSEs. The guidelines integrate a series of deployment
packages that provide a set of artifacts developed to facilitate and
accelerate the implementation of a set of practices for the selected
framework in a VSE. The elements of a typical deployment package include
a process description (tasks, inputs, outputs, and roles), guide, template,
checklist, example, presentation material, mapping to standards and
models, and list of tools to help VSEs implement the process. WG24 plans
to produce a final draft in 2009, with publication by ISO/IEC scheduled
for 2010. In the meantime, the group will make deployment packages freely
available to VSEs. The group also will develop other profiles, covering
different capability levels and application domains, such as finance or
defense.

http://tinyurl.com/yon2gt
See also IEEE Computer Magazine: http://www.computer.org/computer/

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Google, MySpace, Yahoo Forge OpenSocial Foundation
Antone Gonsalves, InformationWeek

Google, MySpace, and Yahoo announced they have agreed to form a non-profit
group that would govern the development of a standard application
programming interface that developers could use in building software for
supporting online social networks. The three Internet companies expected
the OpenSocial Foundation to launch in 90 days, and asked for others in
the industry to rally behind the OpenSocial API, which was developed by
Google to foster development across emerging social-network development
platforms. MySpace, which accounted for three-quarters of the Web traffic
to social networks in the U.S. in 2007, and its second-place rival Facebook
have been opening up their platforms to third-party developers in an attempt
to add services that may attract advertisers and keep subscribers on the
sites longer. While Facebook is offering its own proprietary tools,
MySpace and other social networks, including Google's Orkut, Hi5, Friendster,
Imeem, LinkedIn, and Plaxo, have agreed to adopt the OpenSocial API, which
connects to Web apps built in JavaScript and HTML. Google, MySpace and
Yahoo have agreed to contribute technology to the OpenSocial Foundation
under a "non assertion covenant," which means they won't seek to enforce
any patents on the intellectual property, representatives told reporters
during a teleconference. All companies joining the foundation would be
expected to contribute technology under the Creative Commons copyright
license. The companies will continue to work together and with the
OpenSocial community to further advance the specification through the new
foundation, as well as an open source reference implementation called
Shindig. Shindig is a new project in the Apache Software Foundation
incubator and is an open source implementation of the OpenSocial
specification and gadgets specification. The architectural components of
Shindig are: (1) Gadget Container JavaScript: core JavaScript foundation
for general gadget functionality; this JavaScript manages security,
communication, UI layout, and feature extensions, such as the OpenSocial
API; (2) Gadget Server: an open source version of Google's gmodules.com,
which is used to render the gadget XML into JavaScript and HTML for the
container to expose via the container JavaScript; (3) OpenSocial Container
JavaScript: JavaScript environment that sits on top of the Gadget
Container JavaScript and provides OpenSocial specific functionality --
profiles, friends, activities, datastore; (4) OpenSocial Gateway Server:
an implementation of the server interface to container-specific
information, including the OpenSocial REST APIs, with clear extension
points so others can connect it to their own backends.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206905654
See also the announcement: http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=301421

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Getting Started with XAML in Silverlight
Dan Wahlin, DDJ

The popularity of declarative markup languages has gradually increased
since the initial release of HTML. This shouldn't come as a surprise to
anyone given that markup languages let information be presented to end
users without requiring any knowledge of a programming language. For
years HTML has served as the declarative language of choice for presenting
information to end users through a browser and it certainly isn't going
anywhere in the near future. However, new declarative languages such as
Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) have emerged, providing an
alternate means for displaying data in more rich and engaging ways than
HTML is capable of doing. In this article, I introduce the XAML language
and describe several ways it can be used in Silverlight applications.
The topics covered will focus on functionality available in Silverlight
1.0. Future articles will introduce new XAML features available in
Silverlight 2.0. XAML was originally created for the Windows Presentation
Foundation (WPF) technology released with .NET 3.0. WPF and XAML provide
a way to integrate designers into the application development process
and create rich and interactive desktop (and even Web) applications that
can bind to a variety of data sources. The release of Silverlight 1.0
brought XAML to the world of rich internet application development.
Silverlight exposes a subset of the XAML language found in WPF that can
be run directly in the browser once the Silverlight plug-in has been
installed... Although Silverlight provides a subset of the XAML language
available in WPF, the different declarative elements and attributes
available can accomplish a lot and provide functionality that simply
isn't available in the HTML language. For example, different types of
shapes such as rectangles, ellipses, and lines can be defined and
displayed using XAML. Different types of backgrounds can be defined for
shapes as well including gradients, images, and media clips... Learning
XAML is much like learning HTML; you have to learn the different tag
names and understand how tags can be nested within parent containers.
Once you know the available elements and attributes it's relatively easy
to create a XAML file.

nla_internal_2843268.jpg also the Silverlight SDK: http://www.silverlight.net/

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E-Discovery Guru Not Yet Wed to XML
Craig Ball, Law Technology News

I want XML the dragon slayer: all the functionality of native electronic
evidence coupled with the ease of identification, reliable redaction and
intelligibility of paper documents. The promise is palpable; but for now,
XML is just a clever replacement for load files, those clumsy Sancho
Panzas that serve as squire to addled TIFF image productions. Maybe
that's reason enough to love XML... In e-discovery, we deal with
information piecemeal, such as native documents and system metadata or
e-mail messages and headers. We even deconstruct evidence by imaging it
and stripping it of searchability, only to have to reconstruct the lost
text and produce it with the image. Metadata, header data and searchable
text tend to be produced in containers called load files housing delimited
text, meaning that values in each row of data follow a rigid sequence and
are separated by characters like commas, tabs or quotation marks. Using
load files entails negotiating their organization or agreeing to employ
a structure geared to review software such as CT Summation or Lexis Nexis
Concordance. Conventional load files are unforgiving. Deviate from the
required sequence, or omit, misplace or include an extra delimiter, and
it's a train wreck... There is no standard e-discovery XML schema in wide
use, but consultants George Socha and Tom Gelbmann are promoting one
crafted as part of their groundbreaking Electronic Discovery Reference
Model project. Socha (a member of LTN's Editorial Advisory Board) and
Gelbmann have done an impressive job securing commitments from e-discovery
service providers to adopt EDRM XML as an industry lingua franca... A
mature e-discovery XML schema must incorporate and authenticate native
and nontextual data and ensure that the resulting XML stays valid and
well-formed. It's feasible to encode and incorporate binary formats
using MIME (the same way they travel via e-mail), and to authenticate
by hashing; but these refinements aren't yet a part of the EDRM schema.
So stay tuned. I don't love XML yet, but it promises to be everyone's
new best friend.

http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1206357952124
See also Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) XML: http://edrm.net

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Workflow Resource Patterns as a Tool to Support OASIS BPEL4People
Standardization Efforts
Nick Russell and Wil M.P. van der Aalst, BPTrends Report

OASIS [recently] announced the formation of the WS-BPEL Extension for
People (BPEL4People) Technical Committee... As part of the standardization
process, these proposals are still open to comment in order to ensure
that they meet with general acceptance before being finalized as
standards. However, one of the difficulties with evaluating new
standards initiatives is in finding a suitable conceptual basis against
which their capabilities can be examined and benchmarked. In order to
assist with this activity, this paper proposes the use of the workflow
resource patterns, as a means of evaluating the BPEL4People and
WS-HumanTask proposals. The resource patterns provide a comprehensive
description of the various factors that are relevant to human resource
management and work distribution in business processes. They offer a
means of examining the capabilities of the two proposals from a conceptual
standpoint in a way that is independent of specific technological and
implementation considerations. Through this examination, we hope to
determine where the strengths and weaknesses of these proposals lie and
what opportunities there may be for further improvement. The resource
patterns were developed as part of the Workflow Patterns Initiative,
an ongoing research project that was conceived with the goal of
identifying the core architectural constructs inherent in workflow
technology. The original objective was to delineate the fundamental
requirements that arise during business process modeling on a recurring
basis and describe them in an imperative way. A patterns-based approach
was taken to describe these requirements as it offered both a
language-independent and technology-independent means of expressing
their core characteristics in a form that was sufficiently generic to
allow for its application to a wide variety of offerings. To date, 126
patterns have been identified in the control-flow, data, and resource,
perspectives, and they have been used for a wide variety of purposes,
including evaluation of PAISs, tool selection, process design, education,
and training. The workflow patterns have been enthusiastically received
by both industry practitioners and academics alike. The original
Workflow Patterns paper has been cited by over 150 academic publications,
and the workflow patterns website has been visited more than 100,000
times... We examine the intention and coverage provided by the BPEL4People
and WSHumanTask proposals from various perspectives, starting with their
intention and relationship with related proposals and standards and then
examining their informational and state-based characteristics on a
comparative basis against those described by the workflow resource
patterns... We hope that the observations and recommendations [...] will
assist the OASIS BPEL4People standardization efforts. We are convinced
that an analytical approach based on the workflow/resource patterns can
aid discussions and remove ambiguities...

http://xml.coverpages.org/bpel4people.html#Russell-vdAalst

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BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask Get Reference Implementation
Rich Seeley, SearchSOA.com

BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask (WS-HT), while still specifications in the
OASIS standardization process, can now be used in service-oriented
architecture (SOA) development, said Mike Pellegrini, principal architect
at Active Endpoints Inc. He has incorporated both specifications in this
month's release of his company's visual orchestration systems (VOS)
product, ActiveVOS 5.0, which provides graphic tools for design,
development, testing, deployment and maintenance of SOA applications...
This past week, Pellegrini demonstrated how BPEL4People and WS-HT can be
used in the orchestration of a loan processing application. The demo
showed a business process application where for routine loans a filter
can automate the assessment of whether an applicant is a good or bad risk.
However, when the applicant's credit history is a gray area, a loan
officer must review the application and sign-off on its approval or
denial. That is where BPEL4People and WS-HT come into play. Using those
two specifications, the hand off from the automated process to the loan
officer is tracked by the BPEL-based application, Pellegrini said. As
he showed a view of this process through his visual orchestration tool,
he explained: "It has been routed through the WS-HT specification task
definition. It is routed to a task management system. Now, the system
is just tapping it's fingers waiting for the human to finish." Pellegrini
said this amounted to "a sort of reference implementation for WS-HT
in-box APIs that allows us to get a list of the tasks at hand and the
completed tasks." While the task is not generally a long-running endeavor,
the specifications do allow for that fact that humans aren't usually as
fast at completing tasks as computers are. In the demo, there is
allowance for the task to be saved if the loan officer cannot complete
it in a day, so he can finish it the next day...

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid26_gci1306857,00.html
See also the announcement: http://www.vosibilities.com/wp-content/podcast/Active-Endpoints-ships-ActiveVOS-5.0.pdf

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New Release: OpenUDDI Server Version 0.9.7
Joakim Recht, SourceForge Project Announcement

On behalf of the OpenUDDI (Open Source UDDI) project team, Joakim Recht
has announced the release of OpenUDDI Server Version 0.9.7. The OpenUDDI
project is focused on creating a high performance, easy-to-use UDDI v3
compliant server and client library. The server and client is built
using Java -- version 5 for the server and version 1.4 for the client.
The server uses Hibernate, and supports a wide variety of SQL databases,
as well as LDAP for data storage. The project is built on the Novell
UDDI server but with many new features and optimizations. The primary
contributor is Trifork, sponsored by the Danish National IT and Telecom
Agency. OpenUDDI recently created a new OpenUDDI project site at
SourceForge. Previously, OpenUDDI has been hosted at Softwareborsen,
the Danish government's open source site; however, that site was only in
Danish, and OpenUDDI has attracted interest from other countries; the new
project site which is targeted at a wider audience. Changelog for server
v0.9.7: (1) Tuned category bag heuristics; (2) Improved Hibernate
performance; (3) Always replace Hibernate properties in installer; (4)
Schedule authToken expiration thread periodically; (5) Configure log4j
logging correctly; the default seems to be that 'isTraceEnabled()' returns
true while 'trace()' does nothing. Version 0.9.7 is mainly a maintenance
release with bug and performance fixes.

http://openuddi.sourceforge.net/2008/03/25/openuddi-097/
See also the project web site at SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openuddi/

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The Frog Race: The Desire for Control and How Large Companies Interact
With Standards Organizations
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Articles

I was told recently that of the 250 or so fast-tracked standards that
Ecma has successfully had accepted by National Bodies at ISO/IEC, only
three of them have failed. I thought it would be interesting to read
up a little more on them... Control of the API: ISO standards are a
very scary proposition for large companies. Many of them are not
comfortable with any position other than dominance and stability. The
control of the API is terribly important to them, and they regard loss
of control of the API as a risk (whereas it can be a circuit-breaker
and new-market enabler.) This is one reason why all the large companies
try to favour the member-based boutique standards bodies: W3C, OASIS,
Ecma, because there is more chance that they can establish a beachhead
and make participation at those bodies unattractive or futile for their
competitors. The need for stability is sometimes stronger than the need
for dominance: when you see calls for 'equilibrium' to be maintained
in a market, you know that is a buzzword for maintaining the status quo.
(And it is not always the market leader: it can be a smaller player in
fear of losing their share just as much.) It goes in cycles. The wheel
turns and sooner or later the big companies are forced to deal with ISO
and national bodies, and they find this lack of control very unpleasant.
Sooner or later they find some reason to split back to more dominatable
bodies, and they jump ship. It is not all venal (or even venial) or
negative though: for example, look at SGML: Sun's Jon Bosak (and many
others) were unhappy with the way and speed that SGML maintenance was
proceeding and we went to W3C as a forum for making a simple profile
and addressing a lot of peripheral issues, and XML in turn became the
foundation for the update of SGML. There is always an interplay between
what the boutique, specialist bodies are interested in, and what the
national-body-based regimes such as ISO are interested in: industry
activity is actually really important, because it clarifies what the
ISO groups should be doing. The downside is that when these large,
usually-US-based multinationals hop over to their boutique bodies,
they have to try to justify their jump by slagging off at ISO/IEC.
This is a predictable behaviour: it has happened in the past, it is
happening now, and it will happen in the future. Some parts of the
complaints are often reasonable, some parts are often merely self-serving,
but it is not a new behaviour...

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/03/the_frog_race_the_desire_for_c.html

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XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 25 March 2008