Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 22 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
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com
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HEADLINES:

* Public Review for OASIS Product Life Cycle Support DEXs Version R1
* Portable Symmetric Key Container Specification
* W3C Publishes Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers
* Scala and XML: XML Processing Made Easy
* Drummond Group Forms AS4 Initiative for Web Services Interoperability
* Adobe Breathes Fresh AIR into RIA
* Create Collaborative and Dynamic Method Content Using Web 2.0

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Public Review for OASIS Product Life Cycle Support DEXs Version R1
Tor Arne Irgens (ed), Approved Public Review Draft

Members of the OASIS Product Life Cycle Support (PLCS) TC have approved
a draft of the "Product Life Cycle Support DEXs Version R1"
specification for 60-day public review. The specification is published
as an interactive hypertext application with some 4300 linked files.
The purpose of the OASIS Product Life Cycle Support (PLCS) standard is
to support complex engineered assets such as p***s and ships throughout
their total life cycle. It puts particular emphasis on the in-service
phase of the product and, in particular, it supports the seamless
transition from design and manufacture through to product support and
feedback of usage and change. The data needed is often distributed
over multiple IT systems and organizations, and historically has been
difficult to access and consolidate. The PLCS standard provides a large,
integrated information model covering the whole lifecycle. Together
with the XML binding described in ISO 10303-28, the PLCS standard
provides the basic mechanisms enabling neutral file exchanges between IT
systems and organisations. This helps remove delays and costs for both
the end user of the product and the supplier, and is particularly
important for service-based contracts such as 'power-by-the-hour'. The
PLCS information model is larger than any single existing application,
and needs detailed application rules in order to be used uniformly by
different users and supported by different software applications. This
standard, "OASIS PLCS DEXs ed. 2008:1" defines the usage of the PLCS
information model by breaking it up into smaller parts (DEXs) that
directly support real life business processes. It builds the DEXs from
reusable components (Templates) that guarantees uniform interpretation
of PLCS between different DEXs, and adds extendible business terminology
(Reference Data) to the model. Each Data Exchange Specification (DEX)
provides data exchange and sharing capabilities for a focused set of
transactions based upon the integrated data model of ISO 10303 (STEP)
Application Protocol 239 (Product Life Cycle Support). Future editions
of the OASIS PLCS DEXs will extend the number of DEXs, Templates and
Reference Data, as well as other parts to facilitate the adoption of
the PLCS standard.

http://docs.oasis-open.org/plcs/dexlib/R1/dexlib/oasis_cover.htm
See also the public review announcement: http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/200804/msg00002.html

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Portable Symmetric Key Container
Philip Hoyer, M. Pei, S. Machani (eds), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Provisioning of Symmetric Keys (KEYPROV) Working
Group have published an Internet Draft specification for "Portable
Symmetric Key Container," together with a separate XML schema. The
portable key container is based on an XML schema definition and
contains the following main entities: KeyContainer entity, Device
entity, and Key entity; additionally other XML schema types have been
defined. A Content-type registration 'application/pskc+xml' is defined.
The KEYPROV Working Group, part of the IETF Security Area, is chaired
by Phillip Hallam-Baker and Hannes Tschofenig; it was chartered to
develop protocols and data formats required to support provisioning
and management of symmetric key authentication tokens, both proprietary
and standards based. Current developments in deployment of Shared
Symmetric Key (SSK) tokens have highlighted the need for a standard
protocol for provisioning symmetric keys; in particular the ability
to provision symmetric keys and associated attributes dynamically to
already issued devices such as cell phones and USB drives is highly
desirable. The "Portable Symmetric Key Container" document specifies
a symmetric key format for transport and provisioning of symmetric
keys -- for example One Time Password (OTP) shared secrets or symmetric
cryptographic keys -- to different types of crypto modules such as a
strong authentication device. The standard key transport format enables
enterprises to deploy best-of-breed solutions combining components
from different vendors into the same infrastructure. This work is a
joint effort by the members of OATH (Initiative for Open AuTHentication)
to specify a format that can be freely distributed to the technical
community. The authors believe that a common and shared specification
will facilitate adoption of two-factor authentication on the Internet
by enabling interoperability between commercial and open-source
implementations. With increasing use of symmetric key based authentication
systems such as systems based one time password (OTP) and challenge
response mechanisms, there is a need for vendor interoperability and
a standard format for importing, exporting or provisioning symmetric
keys from one system to another. Traditionally authentication server
vendors and service providers have used proprietary formats for
importing, exporting and provisioning these keys into their systems
making it hard to use tokens from vendor A with a server from vendor B.
The goal is that the format will facilitate dynamic provisioning and
transfer of a symmetric keys such as an OTP shared secret or an
encryption key of different types. In the case of OTP shared secrets,
the format will facilitate dynamic provisioning using an online
provisioning protocol to different flavors of embedded tokens or allow
customers to import new or existing tokens in batch or single instances
into a compliant system. This draft also specifies the key attributes
required for computation such as the initial event counter used in the
HOTP algorithm.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-ietf-keyprov-portable-symmetric-key-container-04.txt
See also the IETF Provisioning of Symmetric Keys (KEYPROV) WG Charter: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/keyprov-charter.html

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W3C Publishes Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers
Staff, W3C Announcement

W3C announced that the Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group has released
a stable version of its Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers, and
has sent an invitation to the community to share reports of browser
support and other feedback on the test itself. In the display, squares
that are a uniform shade of green indicate that your browser supports
the tested feature, while red, white or multi-coloured squares indicate
that your browser does not support the tested feature. Technologies
currently tested include (1) CSS2 min-width: fluid page widths, defined
in percent of the screen width, often depend on the min-width and
max-width properties to avoid turning unreadable on small screens; (2)
Transparent PNG, where PNG, a bitmap image format, supports transparency
and alpha channels, that are useful in building appealing visual effects;
(3) GZIP support: The HTTP protocol allows data to be sent
gzip-compressed when the client advertizes its capability to uncompress
them (through the Accept-Encoding header), thus saving bandwith; (4)
HTTPS: used to establish secure and encrypted connections on the Web;
(5) iframe inclusing of XHTML-served-as-XML content: tests if the UA
supports XML content-types by loading an XHTML document with the
content-type 'application/xhtml+xml'; (6) Static SVG: allows authors
to define vector-based graphics, that can be scaled up and down,
fitting well the needs of mobile devices; (7) XMLHTTPRequest:
XMLHTTPRequest is at the core of AJAX, allowing to update a subset of
an HTML page without requesting a new full content transfer; (8) CSS
Media Queries: allow authors to contrain CSS rules apply in specific
context, for instance so that they only apply to screens of a given
maximum width; (9) Dynamic SVG: also supports animations, that can be
used to create very appealing interfaces; (10) The canvas element: as
element defined in HTML5, offers a Javascript graphics API; (11)
'contenteditable' attribute: makes rich text editing of any element
possible; (12) CSS3 selectors: CSS3 introduces a number of new selectors,
allowing more fine-grained styling, leading to better layouts; the
nth-child() selector is tested here. The chartered goal of the MWI
Test Suites Working Group is to help create a strong foundation for
the mobile Web through the development of a set of test suites. The
test suites should be more extensive than those typically produced by
W3C Working Groups as exit criterion from Candidate Recommendation,
and could be suitable for checking conformance of user agents to
specifications in the mobile Web space.

http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/04/is_your_mobile_browser_ready_f.html
See also the W3C Mobile Web Initiative Test Suites Working Group: http://www.w3.org/2005/MWI/Tests/

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Scala and XML: XML Processing Made Easy
Michael Galpin, IBM developerWorks

Scala is a popular new programming language that runs on the Java
Virtual Machine (JVM.) Scala compiles into byte-code and thus it can
leverage the Java programming language. Its syntax, however, makes it
a powerful alternative to Java code in certain scenarios. One of those
scenarios is XML processing. Scala lets you navigate and process parsed
XML in several ways. It also has first class support for XML built right
in, so you don't need to create strings of XML or programmatically build
DOM trees. Like most programming languages, Scala gives you multiple
options for parsing XML. These are the same basic ones: InfoSet/DOM
based representations, push (SAX) or pull (StAX) events, or data-binding
similar to Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB.) You will explore
the DOM based manipulation, as it demonstrates many of the benefits of
Scala's syntax. Many programming languages represent XML as a DOM tree.
This has many advantages but it can be laborious to programmatically
traverse a tree to extract data from the XML document. Java technology
has libraries that leverage XPath syntax. Scala takes a similar approach,
but it has some advantages. Scala has many functional language aspects
to it. There are no operators (like + or *) in Scala. Instead symbols
like + or * are used to define functions that can do things like normal
numerical addition and subtraction. This also means that you can define
operators (since they are actually just functions) to any type. It is
much more powerful than operator overloading in languages like C++. In
the case of XPath, you are able to use certain parts of XPath syntax
directly in Scala, as it just gets translated into a function call.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-scalaxml/
See also the online book 'scala.xml': http://burak.emir.googlepages.com/scalaxbook.docbk.html

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Drummond Group Forms AS4 Initiative for Web Services Interoperability
Staff, Drummond Group Announcement

Drummond Group Inc, a leading B2B software certification authority,
announced that it has transitioned a set of functional requirements
developed with Cisco, Extol, Sterling Commerce and others over to the
OASIS ebXML Messaging Services Technical Committee (ebMS 3.0) which
will provide a standardized entry-level on-ramp for secure,
payload-agnostic document exchange using Web services. These functional
requirements are based on mapping IETF RFC 4130 (AS2) to a simplified
composition of WS-* specifications and WS-I profiles in an effort to
promote the adoption and interoperability of Web services for B2B
messaging. With the recent publication of the ebMS 3.0 specification
and its foundation on WS-* specifications and WS-I profiles, it seemed
natural that this body of work should be realized as a Conformance
Profile of ebMS 3.0. Recently, the OASIS ebXML Messaging Services TC
approved the creation of a subcommittee to develop a profile of ebMS
3.0 entitled "AS4: Secure B2B Document Exchange Using Web Services."
For nearly a year, Drummond Group has facilitated meetings with a group
of software vendors who recognized the need to address lingering
interoperability issues and the practical desire to reduce complexity
associated with Web services messaging. While many of the vendors
involved in this effort had experienced implementing the widely
successful AS2 (RFC 4130) messaging protocol, the Web services standards
landscape was largely devoid of a similar "simple and elegant" solution
for secure document exchange over a WS-* based specification stack.
Furthermore, the group recognized that compliance to conformance engine
testing is not a replacement for full-matrix interoperability testing
to ensure supply chains and vertical markets with a robust pool of
interoperable software implementations. After surveying the existing
Web services standards landscape, it was clear that this group of
vendors shared some common goals with the ebMS 3.0 technical committee
at OASIS, and that an industry-sponsored profile of ebMS 3.0 presented
a win-win scenario for a simplified on-ramp to Web services B2B messaging.

http://xml.coverpages.org/Drummond-AS4.html
See also AS4 Secure B2B Document Exchange Using Web Services: http://www.drummondgroup.com/html-v2/as4.html

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Adobe Breathes Fresh AIR into RIA
James R. Borck, InfoWorld Product Review

"Adobe AIR 1.0 brings new hope to Web developers looking to combine the
global connectedness of browser-based applications with the persistence
and functionality of first-class, local desktop applications. AIR
(Adobe Integrated Runtime) packages a host of Web technologies and
enables RIAs (rich Internet applications) to run outside of the browser
on the user's local desktop. Those underlying technologies can be
Adobe's own Flex, Flash, and ActionScript, for example, or just plain
old HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX libraries. Adobe AIR comprises
several components. The SDK is a command line toolkit for packaging and
deploying Web applications as AIR apps. It includes a schema template
for generating the AIR manifests (which define various properties of
each application including name, security certificate, and files
included within the package), APIs for the framework, a service monitor,
and a command line debugger that lets you do some testing without first
needing to package up your app. The entire lot is available for free
and open sourced under the Mozilla Public License. AIR incorporates dual
engines (the Flash/ActionScript JIT and WebKit) to support applications
built in either Flex/Flash/MXML or HTML/JavaScript. AJAX developers can
run AIR without ever needing to learn ActionScript. The underlying
application components are packed into an AIR installer file, which is
little more than a zip file containing program assets, the XML manifest,
and a digital certificate to verify authenticity. The command line tools
are easy enough to work with, and you can use any text editor to create
an AIR app. Adobe provides plug-ins for creating AIR applications in
Flash CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3, as well as third-party tools such as
Aptana Studio. However, I recommend you try Adobe's new commercial
development tool, the Flex Builder 3.0 IDE. Based on Eclipse, Flex
Builder provides easy graphical tools for laying out GUIs, binding to
servers and data sources, and generating the underlying MXML code.
AIR apps can take advantage of protocols including FTP, AMF
(ActionScript Messaging Format), JSON, SOAP, and RTMP (Real Time
Messaging Protocol for streaming media), and they can communicate with
Adobe LiveCycle and BlazeDS servers using server-side RPC and messaging
calls."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/21/17TC-adobe-air_1.html
See also the product description: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

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Create Collaborative and Dynamic Method Content Using Web 2.0
John Boyer, Bertrand Portier, Eoin ***; IBM developerWorks

This article describes how to leverage Web 2.0 technologies to extend
software development process content, which is typically published
static as HTML. It explains how you can develop the ability to
collaboratively edit method content and have access to the latest
dynamic content within a method context. Software development methods
like RUP and IBM RUP Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA)
provide static process guidance that's published as HTML. For a method
to be truly useful it needs to be augmented with context-specific assets.
These are generally content, tooling, and people assets. The content
assets include a range of resources, such as documents, presentations,
models, social bookmarks, and others. For example, if this method is
being applied to aid in business modeling in a telephone company (telco)
vertical account, then the method should provide guidance around specific
tooling and content that can be leveraged. Because the method content
is frozen after being published, it's not extensible. Therefore, you
can leverage Web 2.0 technologies to augment the static content with
supplemental wiki pages that enable collaborative editing and dynamic
Web feeds. These pages are referred to as extension points... [In our
example] the wiki site contains the following two areas. The first
area contains current information on service identification tool
offerings to make the activity more consistent and streamlined. Because
this is a collaborative area, the SOA architect is encouraged to edit
these instructions to keep them up to date and to provide the latest
field-based development thinking around these tools. The second area
of the wiki Web site provides dynamic content relevant to the architect
for this particular extension point in the form of Web feeds. In the
case of the service identification extension, the area is populated by
dynamic content around service identification. This is made possible by
being able to embed all of this dynamic content in a wiki with syndicated
Web feeds formatted as RSS or Atom. Each of the dynamic items above has
its own Web feed, and these feeds are aggregated to provide all of the
dynamic content. This is already possible, and by standardizing on Web
2.0 technology and tags, for example, all service identification-related
content checked into an asset repository are tags with the service
identification and dynamic-method keyword. After an item is checked
into the Web feed-enabled asset repository with these keywords, the
Web feed provided by the asset repository is automatically updated. As
the extension page is refreshed for the service identification extension
point, the updated content is now available to the method practitioner.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-web2method/

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XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 22 April 2008