Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 23 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:

* Internet2 Community Releases Shibboleth Version 2.0
* Device Description Repository Core Vocabulary
* Public Review Draft for OASIS UBL 2.0 Errata Document
* ROI by the Ton: Going Green with SOA, EDA, RIA and Web 2.0
* Build Custom Templates for Your Data-Driven Web Sites
* Sun Gears JavaFX for Consumer Move
* Intel Moves Into Mashups

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Internet2 Community Releases Shibboleth Version 2.0
Staff, Internet2 Initiative Announcement

Internet2 announced that it has released Shibboleth 2.0, the latest major
version of the most widely-deployed federated authentication
implementation. Developed by the Internet2 community and its partners
around the world, the latest release greatly enhances several key elements
of Shibboleth in an effort to ensure interoperability with other commercial
and open-source federated identity solutions; to improve personalization
and security; as well as to ease installation, management and operation
processes. The goal is to provide a more robust and interoperable platform
that will help catalyze the worldwide growth of higher education and
research federations like the InCommon Federation which serves the U.S.
higher education sector and provides a framework for participating
organizations to collaborate and share resources using Shibboleth
technology... Shibboleth 2.0 adds an open source implementation of the
OASIS SAML 2.0 standard to the suite of protocol implementations
available in previous releases. The software provides a secure,
single-sign on mechanism for institutions to enable their users to
access protected online resources within their campuses and from their
external service provider partners while at the same time protecting
individual user privacy. Shibboleth leverages an institution's login
and directory systems to authenticate users at their home institution
(or "identity provider") and then passes only the relevant information,
or "attributes," to the service provider to enable the user access to
its online resources. Attributes can include a wide range of information
that characterize the user, e.g. identity, permissions at the service
provider, employee or student status at the university, class enrollment,
age, graduating class, etc. The service provider and institution make
agreements on which attributes are needed to make that user eligible to
access specific resources. Shibboleth 2.0 enhances the ability for
identity providers to use and manage "anonymous identifiers" to protect
user privacy but still allow for personalization. The identity provider
assigns a persistent unique identifier to a specific user which allows
service providers to tailor and improve services based on the needs of
that user without knowing their specific identity. For instance, a
medical student searching for articles on a specific disease or treatment
via an online medical journal could save his or her searches using the
anonymous identifier and then build on their research over time. For
the user, this is a transparent process; no knowledge of the identifier
is needed...

http://xml.coverpages.org/ShibbolethV20-Release.html
See also SAML references: http://xml.coverpages.org/saml.html

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Device Description Repository Core Vocabulary
Jo Rabin, Andrea Trasatti, Rotan Hanrahan (eds), W3C Technical Report

Members of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative Device Description Working
Group have published a Group Note for "Device Description Repository
Core Vocabulary." This document identifies properties that are considered
essential for adaptation of content in the Mobile Web. Its intended use
is to define a baseline Vocabulary for Device Description Repository
(DDR) implementations. The Vocabulary defined in this document is not
intended to represent an exhaustive set of properties for content
adaptation. DDR Implementations that require additional properties are
free to make use of additional vocabularies. The process of creating a
new Vocabulary can be modeled on the process described in this document.
The Property identifiers in this Vocabulary are associated with the
namespace 'http://www.w3.org/2008/01/ddr-core-vocabulary'; the
enumerations described in the document contain initial values that
should be supported by all implementations of the Core Vocabulary and
which may be supplemented by further DDR specific values. Named
'Properties' for the DDR Core Vocabulary in this Note include Vendor;
Model; Version; Display Width; Display Height; Display Color Depth;
Input Devices; Markup Support; Stylesheet Support; Image Format Support;
Input Mode Support; Cookie Support; and Script Support.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/NOTE-ddr-core-vocabulary-20080414/
See also the W3C Mobile Web Initiative: http://www.w3.org/Mobile/

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Public Review Draft for OASIS UBL 2.0 Errata Document
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS announced a 15-day review period for the specification "UBL 2.0
Errata 01, Public Review Draft 01," ending 2008-05-08. The Universal
Business Language v2.0 was approved as an OASIS Standard in December
2006. UBL defines a generic XML interchange format for business documents
that can be extended to meet the requirements of particular industries.
Specifically, UBL provides: (1) A library of XML schemas for reusable
data components such as 'Address,' 'Item,' and 'Payment' -- the common
data elements of everyday business documents. (2) A set of XML schemas
for common business documents such as 'Order,' 'Despatch Advice,' and
'Invoice' that are constructed from the UBL library components and can
be used in generic procurement and transportation contexts. The UBL 2.0
Update Package provides UBL 2.0 users with an upgrade to the December
2006 UBL 2.0 release. Specifically, it corrects a number of typos and
editorial errors in the documentary portions of the UBL 2.0 schemas
and data models; fixes a broken entry for BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA in the
file 'cl/gc/default/CountryIdentificationCode-2.0.gc''; upgrades all
the code list files from genericode 0.4 format to genericode 1.0 format
and updates the listURI in the Qualified Datatype spreadsheet and
schemas accordingly; revises 'cl/gc/special-purpose/PortCode-2.0.gc'
to add additional columns and breaks out subsets of that code list into
smaller files for ease of implementation; replaces the original
'val/defaultCodeList.xsl' with a version that reflects the revised
code lists. None of these changes is considered substantive in the
sense that any of them would require modifications to existing software.
The UBL 2.0 Update Package is provided as a single zip file, together
with instructions for use in a new or existing installation.

http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/errata-UBL-2.0/prd-UBL-2.0-update.html
See also the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) TC: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/

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ROI by the Ton: Going Green with SOA, EDA, RIA and Web 2.0
David A. Chappell, O'Reilly Articles

I would like to tell you about a concrete example in an exciting account
of one of Oracle's customers, Verizon Wireless, who is in the process
of going green by rewriting their fraud detection application using
SOA, EDA, and Web 2.0, and as a result plan to eliminate 6 tons of
hardware from their datacenter, and reduce power consumption by 99.5%
from 200 kW/h down to 1100 W/h. From a software and architecture
perspective, this is an exciting story about how Verizon Wireless is
building a new Fraud Detection application which uses Event-Driven
Architecture (EDA), BPEL process management, a business rules engine
together with a Web 2.0 style Flash/Flex UI to build what would be
referred to in financial services as a straight-through processing
application. In the process of doing this, they are dramatically
reducing the amount of code that has been written, and the amount of
data that needs to be stored locally. As such, they plan to eliminate
6 E-class Sun boxes using ~192 processors and replace them with a
single 8 core processor on a Sun UltraSPARC T1 using the Niagara chip
architecture... here is the basic outline of the new application
structure: (1) Data coming from the switches is analyzed and checked
for business exceptions. Examples of business exceptions include
detection of excessive data thresholds, which could be an indicator
of a customer using their laptop to run a streaming video website,
or the practice of phone cloning to make phone calls using someone
else's account, or more ambitious fraud such as masquerading as a
third party roaming partner and attempting to charge back to Verizon --
this is the EDA part of the architecture. (2) When such an exception
is detected, an event is generated and sent to a BPEL process. The BPEL
process invokes a number of services, which includes going out directly
to the source of the call detail records to get the information
necessary to enrich the event data. It is then fed into a rules engine
to check for violations, make decisions based on policy, and then on
to generate more detailed reports -- this is the SOA part of it. (3)
The supporting SOA technologies involved include BPEL, a rules engine
with a service oriented interface, and reliable messaging. (4) The UI
interface is RIA/Flex based, and runs mostly in the browser -- this
is the RIA/Web 2.0 part of it...

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/04/soa_and_web20_by_the_ton_going.html

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Build Custom Templates for Your Data-Driven Web Sites
Ken Ramirez, IBM developerWorks

This article demonstrates why you should use data-driven techniques for
your own Web sites. It discusses the concepts behind writing clean,
optimized, and strict code with particular attention to using these
techniques in the development of templates for Web sites. Most
developers feel comfortable writing the middle-tier and database code
but loathe dealing with front-end formatting, tables, and the list of
tags, attributes, and styles that come along when dealing with HTML and
its handsome cousin, CSS. Even if you manage to tango with HTML at a
successful level, most Web sites are entirely rewritten each time they
need a new look and feel. To re-skin the site, however, is just too
expensive and confusing most of the time -- especially if the site's
code has sat untouched for a while. To make matters worse, with the
advent of Web 2.0, many developers are confused about the proper
approach to development. We know that part of the equation should be
to think ahead (providing a solid design and architecture), but quality
is usually compromised because of budget and deadline concerns. Unless
you or your clients aren't concerned about having to redo the Web site
from scratch the next time the site's appearance must be upgraded,
you'll need to ensure that the code is clean, optimized, and uses strict
coding techniques on the front end to build solid foundations that lend
themselves to Web 2.0, including Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax).
Additionally, making content changes would be easier if you develop a
Web site that has a data-driven component to it -- one for which you
can modify the content of the Web site using a Web-based approach rather
than having to modify the actual pages themselves each time you want to
augment the site's content. This article discusses these concepts as
well as problem resolution. Adding a data-driven element to this formula
makes your Web sites even more flexible, allowing non-technical
personnel or the Web site's owner to make content (both text and
graphics) changes to the site.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-customtemp/

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Sun Gears JavaFX for Consumer Move
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

JavaOne show will spotlight Sun's plans to expand the JavaFX platform
to enable development of consumer applications. JavaFX, introduced by
Sun last year as a Java-based platform for building visually oriented
applications, will be leveraged in the growing consumer application
space. JavaFX technologies currently are available only in pre-release
forms, but Sun already has big plans to expand the platform to enable
development of consumer applications including productivity systems,
games, and social applications similar to Facebook. Already featuring
a scripting element called JavaFX Script, JavaFX also will include
extensions called profiles, which enable applications to be tuned to
specific varieties of systems. The first of these will be called JavaFX
Desktop, for desktop systems. JavaFX Script uses a declarative syntax
for specifying GUI components, so a developer's code closely matches
the actual layout of the GUI. Through declarative databinding and
incremental evaluation, JavaFX Script enables developers to create and
configure individual components by automatically synchronizing
application data and GUI components. It works with all major IDEs,
including NetBeans, which is the reference implementation IDE for Java
development. Unlike many other Java scripting languages, JavaFX Script
is statically typed and has most of the same code structuring, reuse,
and encapsulation features that make it possible to create and maintain
very large programs in Java. Also planned are the previously announced
JavaFX Mobile, for mobile applications, as well as profiles for set-top
boxes, smart phones, and feature phones, which offer more limited
capabilities than smart phones. JavaFX Mobile is a complete,
pre-integrated software system for advanced mobile devices designed to
enable developers to author rich, high-impact content and network-based
services. Built around open and standards-based technologies, JavaFX
Mobile enables control and flexibility for the mobile ecosystem. The
Sun-backed NetBeans open source tools platform will serve as the basis
for building JavaFX applications, but additional tools will be added
as supplements. Capabilities for application designers will be included
in the mix. Sun's consumer ecosystem partners for Java include
traditional Java developers, content/media-oriented developers, worldwide
operators, advertisers, and consumers. Sun officials noted that Java
already is on billions of phones.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/23/Sun-gears-JavaFX-for-consumer-move_1.html

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Intel Moves Into Mashups
Kenneth Corbin, InternetNews.com

Intel will release its first mashup product at the Web 2.0 conference
in San Francisco. The chipmaker is betting that its approach will stand
out in a burgeoning market for mashups. Intel Mash Maker ("Mashups for
the Masses") allows you to build mashups on-the-fly -- combine content
from multiple sources such as web content, videos, maps, RSS feeds,
photos, and display in one place. Intel's Mash Maker is a client-side
browser extension that allows users to augment the Web pages they're
viewing in real-time with widgets that display data drawn from other
sources. This enables a person planning a party, for instance, to view
the locations of their Facebook friends plotted on a map powered by
Google. Robert Ennals, a senior researcher with Intel and architect
of the Mash Maker: "The basic idea of Mash Maker is to make the Web
look like you want; Mash Maker is not creating new Web sites at all;
we're creating new ways of viewing the same sites." Mashups are fast
emerging as a signature feature of the Web 2.0 phenomenon in which
people expect more control over their Web experience. Whereas many
existing mashup applications are geared for enterprise use, or offer
a stock set of premade mashups created by a handful of developers,
Intel's product is built for limitless customization. It is also
trainable, Ennals said, so it can generate recommendations about what
applications might be most useful for certain users. Intel is rolling
out the browser extension with support for Internet Explorer 7 and
Firefox 3. The researchers have been testing the product in a closed
preview for about six months. Intel developed and tested the Firefox
version first, so as released today, the Internet Explorer version
is less polished, but it has the same functionalities, Ennals said.
The Mash Maker can build mashups based on a semantic understanding
of the information on a Web page collected using an extractor tool.
The product that will be available as a free download today has
mashups based on more than 1,000 sites, a list that Klaus said roughly
corresponds with the most heavily trafficked destinations on the Web.

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3742276/Intel+Moves+Into+Mashups.htm
See also the Intel web site: http://mashmaker.intel.com/web/

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XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 23 April 2008