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XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 02 April 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
BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com
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HEADLINES:

* Approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an International Standard
* Using the Eclipse BPEL Plug-In for WS-BPEL V2.0 Business Processes
* Open Web SSO Project - Build 4
* OASIS Open Reputation Management Systems (ORMS) Technical Committee
* Facebook Meets .Net
* IONA Becomes Silver Sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation

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Approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an International Standard
Staff, International Organization for Standardization Announcement

"'ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology -- Office Open XML File
Formats', has received the necessary number of votes for approval as
an ISO/IEC International Standard... The Ballot Resolution Meeting
(BRM) was held in Geneva during the week 25-29 February 2008. By
eliminating redundancies, the comments had been reduced to just over
1,000 individual issues to be considered. Issues considered as
priorities by national members (such as accessibility, date formats,
conformance issues) were discussed, and the other comments were
addressed through a voting process on the remaining items, a system
agreed by the BRM participants. The issues addressed and revised have
resulted in sufficient national bodies withdrawing their earlier
disapproval votes, or transforming them into positive votes, so that
the criteria for approval of the document as an International Standard
have now been met. Subject to there being no formal appeals from ISO/IEC
national bodies in the next two months, the International Standard
will accordingly proceed to publication. ISO/IEC 29500 is a 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. ISO/IEC
DIS 29500 was originally developed as the Office Open XML Specification
by Microsoft Corporation which submitted it to Ecma International, an
information technology industry association, for transposing into an
ECMA standard. Following a process in which other IT industry players
participated, Ecma International subsequently published the document
as ECMA standard 376. Ecma International then submitted the standard
in December 2006 to ISO/IEC JTC 1, with whom it has category A liaison
status, for adoption as an International Standard under the JTC 1 "fast
track" procedure. This allows a standard developed within the IT industry
to be presented to JTC 1 as a draft international standard (DIS) that
can be adopted after a process of review and balloting. This process
has now been concluded with the end of the 30-day period following the
ballot resolution meeting. The process was open to the IEC and ISO
national member bodies from 104 countries, including 41 that are
participating members of the joint ISO/IEC JTC 1."

http://xml.coverpages.org/DIS-29500-ISO-Approval.html

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Using the Eclipse BPEL Plug-In for WS-BPEL V2.0 Business Processes
Ilya Platonov, Artem Papkov, Jim Smith; IBM developerWorks

BPEL V2.0 is a powerful language intended to help in development of huge,
complex applications consisting of a lot of other components and Web
services. The BPEL vendor-neutral specification was developed by OASIS
to specify business processes as a set of interactions between Web
services. BPEL allows you to describe long-running workflows using
graphical editors to present workflows on human-friendly diagrams.
The Apache Foundation calls its implementation of the Web Services
Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) V2.0 the Orchestration
Director Engine (ODE). ODE executes WS-BPEL processes, which are capable
of communicating with Web services, sending and receiving messages, etc.
The Eclipse BPEL project is a related open source project that provides
an Eclipse plug-in for the visual development of WS-BPEL V2.0 processes.
This article examines ODE V1.1 and the Eclipse BPEL project milestone M3,
describing how to create your own BPEL process and integrate it into
your application. Summary from the ODE web site: "WS-BPEL is an XML-based
language defining several constructs to write business processes. It
defines a set of basic control structures like conditions or loops as
well as elements to invoke web services and receive messages from
services. It relies on WSDL to express web services interfaces. Message
structures can be manipulated, assigning parts or the whole of them to
variables that can in turn be used to send other messages. Apache ODE
(Orchestration Director Engine) executes business processes written
following the WS-BPEL standard. It talks to web services, sending and
receiving messages, handling data manipulation and error recovery as
described by your process definition. It supports both long and short
living process executions to orchestrate all the services that are part
of your application."

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-eclipse-bpel2.0/
See also the Apache ODE Project web site: http://ode.apache.org/

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Open Web SSO Project - Build 4
Pat Patterson, Blog

Developer blogs from the OpenSSO Project announce the release of OpenSSO
Version 1 Build 4. The Open Web SSO project (OpenSSO) provides core
identity services to simplify the implementation of transparent single
sign-on (SSO) as a security component in a network infrastructure.
OpenSSO provides the foundation for integrating diverse web applications
that might typically operate against a disparate set of identity
repositories and are hosted on a variety of platforms such as web and
application servers. This project is based on the code base of Sun Java
System Access Manager, a core identity infrastructure product offered
by Sun Microsystems. The objectives of the OpenSSO project are to provide
open access to an identity infrastructure source code; to enable
innovation to build the next generation of open network identity
services; and to establish open XML-based file formats and
language-independent component application programming interfaces (APIs).
New in OpenSSO Build 4, according to Pat Patterson's blog: (1) New
OpenSSO configurator; the developers request feedback on the new
configuration UI, via the project mailing lists; (2) WS-Trust Security
Token Service (STS) is available on Glassfish, Sun Application Server,
Sun Web Server, Geronimo, Tomcat and WebSphere; we've done a lot of
trickery with classloaders to get this working across a wide range of
containers... still working on support in Oracle Application Server,
JBoss and WebLogic Server; (3) Simplified STS client sample; (4)
Configuration and/or user store replication across multiple OpenSSO
instances where the embedded instance of OpenDS is in use; (5)
Security/SSL related fixes; (6) General bug fixes in all areas." Note:
OpenDS is an open source community project building a free and
comprehensive next generation directory service. OpenDS is designed
to address large deployments, to provide high performance, to be
highly extensible, and to be easy to deploy, manage and monitor. The
directory service includes not only the Directory Server, but also
other essential directory-related services like directory proxy,
virtual directory, namespace distribution and data synchronization.
Initial development of OpenDS was done by Sun Microsystems, but is
now available under the open source Common Development and Distribution
License (CDDL).

http://blogs.sun.com/superpat/entry/opensso_build_4
See also the OpenSSO Project web site: http://opensso.org/

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OASIS Open Reputation Management Systems (ORMS) Technical Committee
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS recently announced the formation of a new technical committee to
make it easier to validate the trustworthiness of businesses, projects,
and people working and socializing in electronic communities. The OASIS
Open Reputation Management Systems (ORMS) Technical Committee will
define common data formats for consistently and reliably representing
reputation scores. ORMS will be relevant for a variety of applications
including validating the trustworthiness of sellers and buyers in online
auctions, detecting free riders in peer-to-peer networks, and helping
to ensure the authenticity of signature keys in a web of trust. ORMS
will also help enable smarter searching of web sites, blogs, events,
products, companies, and individuals. Because the majority of existing
on-line rating, scoring and reputation mechanisms have been developed
by private companies using proprietary schemas, there is currently no
common method to query, store, aggregate, or verify claims between
systems. The different sources of reputation data -- user feedback
channels (product ratings, comment forms), online user profiles, etc. --
are each uniquely susceptible to bad actors, manipulation of data for
specific purposes, and spammers. ORMS will not attempt to define
algorithms for computing reputation scores. Instead, the OASIS Committee
will provide the means for understanding the relevancy of a score within
a given context.

http://xml.coverpages.org/ORMS-Announce-200804.html
See also the OASIS ORMS Technical Committee: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/orms/

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Facebook Meets .Net
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Facebook is a popular social network site and a destination for
application developers, but developers need to learn its peculiarities,
according to a VSLive conference presentation in San Francisco.
Development on Facebook is more like embedded development rather than
normal Web development, said speaker Jeffrey McManus, CEO of Platform
Associates, a consulting firm. Facebook is a platform featuring a
collection of technologies enabling developers to create applications
that incorporate Facebook data. This could include applications, for
example, that make Web services calls to Facebook and applications
that can run within Facebook. Technologies for developing applications
in Facebook include FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and IFrame, an HTML
construct that opens a hole in a page enabling display of another page
inside of it, according to McManus. Also factored into the equation is
Facbook.Net, a .Net library that wraps Web services and handles
authentication and other elements. Silverlight, Microsoft's new
multimedia presentation technology, also can be supported in Facebook
using FBML.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/01/facebook-net_1.html
See also Facebook Markup Language: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/FBML

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IONA Becomes Silver Sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation
Staff, IONA Technologies Announcement

IONA announced that it has become a Silver Sponsor of The Apache Software
Foundation. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a non-profit
corporation dedicated to consensus-based, collaborative software
development. Financial sponsorship will help ASF to acquire servers and
hardware infrastructure, purchase bandwidth and needed resources, and
increase awareness of ASF projects and incubating initiatives. IONA's
commitment to Open Source software is an integral part of its 15-year
heritage. With a high degree of Open Source community involvement, IONA
supports the efforts of its developers who are members and contributors
to a number of ASF projects. Aiding the efforts for increased adoption
of Open Source SOA, IONA developers play key roles in the Apache
ActiveMQ project, the Apache ServiceMix project, the CXF project in
the Apache Incubator, and the Apache Camel project, a sub-project of
ActiveMQ. IONA's distributed, Open Source SOA infrastructure solutions,
FUSE Message Broker, FUSE ESB, FUSE Services Framework and FUSE Mediation
Router, are built on code developed in those ASF projects and are
distributed under the terms of the Apache License 2.0. IONA provides
professional support, consulting and training for enterprise customers
looking to deploy this Open Source SOA technology in their mission-critical
business applications. IONA also recently announced the launch of Artix
Connect for WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). Artix Connect for
WCF enables Global 2000 customers to optimize their investments in
Microsoft technology and seamlessly extend connectivity with legacy
applications from within the Microsoft Visual Studio development
environment. By wrapping back-office legacy systems behind
standards-based Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces,
Artix Connect for WCF allows the .NET developer to connect with Java
or CORBA without the need for custom adapters or new code generation.
The product enables companies to leverage existing investments in Java,
CORBA, and more, without leaving the Microsoft Visual Studio development
environment or requiring additional skills. Artix Data Services, a
component of IONA's Artix family of advanced SOA infrastructure products,
offers the broadest support for financial services standards, message
types and validation rules, including SWIFT, SEPA, FpML, TWIST, ISO
20022, CREST and FIX, with the ability to model any data format for
complete compliance.

http://www.iona.com/pressroom/2008/20080331.htm
See also IONA and standards: http://www.iona.com/products/standards/welcome.htm

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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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