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XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 30 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:

* Service Component Architecture: Making SOA Easier
* DMTF Releases WS-Management Specification as a Final Standard
* W3C Call for Implementations: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
* Use XQuery from a Java Environment
* TIBCO Proactive Management Approach Enables SOA as a Managed Service
* OASIS Members Propose Creation of DITA Adoption Subcommittee

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Service Component Architecture: Making SOA Easier
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Service Component Architecture (SCA), an SOA specification for
transforming IT assets into reusable services, was hailed Tuesday
[2008-04-29] as a way to build services with lower barriers to adoption
and link SOA to Web 2.0. Speaking at the OASIS Open Standards 2008
symposium in Santa Clara, Calif., IBM's Mike Edwards, co chair of the
OASIS SCA Assembly Technical Committee, touted the technology. He also
promoted its companion specification, Service Data Objects (SDO), which
enables uniform access and manipulation of data from multiple sources,
including databases and enterprise information systems. SDO and SCA
are backed by companies such as IBM and SAP... SCA provides an
executable model for assembling services and supports multiple languages
such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services),
Java and PHP scripts. Web 2.0 could leverage SCA, since Web 2.0
environments are typically service environments, Edwards said. An
interactive application running on a browser has pieces running on
the front end that requires knowledge of connections pertaining to
what is running on the front-end system and the server. SCA "is a
great way to deal with that," said Edwards. SCA offers a single
programming model for aspects of the service lifecycle, including
construction, assembly, and deployment. Developers can focus on writing
business logic. SCA is not tied to a specific programming language,
protocol, technology, or runtime. It is not a workflow model such as
BPEL, and it is not Web services -- although many SCA applications
will use Web services... SDO gives developers a single programming
model for using data sources. Edwards cited the example of a bank
using SDO and SCA for an SOA rollout. Services were built with SCA
while IFX (Internal Financial Exchange) data was packaged with SDO...
There are multiple implementations of SCO and SDO; official 1.0
versions of SDO and SCA from OASIS are expected by the end of 2008.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/30/Service-Component-Architecture-makes-SOA-easier_1.html
See also the OASIS Open Composite Services Architecture (CSA) Member Section: http://www.oasis-opencsa.org/

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DMTF Releases WS-Management Specification as a Final Standard
Staff, Distributed Management Task Force Announcement

DMTF announced that its Web Services for Management (WS-Management)
standard has been ratified Final. Since its debut in April 2006,
WS-Management has been successfully implemented in a wide range of
products from DMTF member companies -- moving it from a Preliminary
to Final Standard. IT managers benefit from WS-Management because
deployments that support the standard will enable them to remotely
access devices on their networks -- everything from desktop and
mobile systems and servers today, to power management and virtualized
environments in the future. WS-Management helps reduce the cost and
complexity of IT management by leveraging Internet protocols and
standards to manage diverse deployments of the Common Information
Model (CIM) instrumented devices. It also helps enable a secure,
simple and low-cost platform for managing mixed IT environments.
The WS-Management standard, the latest component of DMTF's Web Based
Enterprise Management (WBEM) initiative, has provided an important
building block ingredient for DMTF management initiatives. The
WS-Management standard is also referenced as the protocol of choice
for both the Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware
(DASH) and Systems Management Architecture for System Hardware (SMASH)
initiatives. The WS-Management specification promotes interoperability
between management applications and managed resources by identifying
a core set of Web service specifications and usage requirements to
expose a common set of operations that are central to all systems
management. The specification also enables the same protocol interface
to be used in various scenarios for different operating systems and
system states and provides a security profile to ensure encrypted and
authenticated exchange of data. WS-Management is an important
specification in support of the DMTF effort to expose the CIM resources
via state-of-the-art Web services protocols. Coupled with Web Services
CIM and the WS-Management CIM Binding, the WS-Management specification
allows systems and services to be managed by a wide assortment of
management tools and systems, giving customers a greater choice on
the tools they use for their management infrastructure.

http://xml.coverpages.org/DMTF-WS-Management-Final.html
See also the DMTF web site: http://www.dmtf.org/

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W3C Call for Implementations: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
Staff, W3C Announcement

W3C announced that the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
2.0" is ready for developers and designers to test in Web content
and Web applications. Publication of WCAG 2.0 as a Candidate
Recommendation, a major step in the W3C standards process, signals
broad consensus in the WCAG Working Group and among public reviewers
on the technical content of the document. WCAG addresses accessibility
of Web content for people with disabilities and many elderly users,
and is one of three Web accessibility guidelines produced by W3C's
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). WCAG 2.0 provides a stable
foundation for accessibility of Web content and Web applications, and
supporting documents enable it to be used flexibly across the broad
range of Web technologies and environments in today's Web. WCAG 2.0
is designed to be easier to use than WCAG 1.0, and is more precisely
testable, using a combination of automated testing and human evaluation.
The Working Group seeks feedback from implemention experience of WCAG
2.0 in diverse types of Web sites and Web applications by 30-June-2008.
A comprehensive suite of supporting documents is available to help
implementors, and includes How to Meet WCAG 2.0, which allows
developers and designers to build a customized view of WCAG 2.0
requirements; Understanding WCAG 2.0; Techniques for WCAG 2.0; an
Overview of WCAG 2.0 Documents; a WCAG 2.0 FAQ; and Comparison between
WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 to support transitions to WCAG 2.0. Gregg
Vanderheiden, Co-Chair of the WCAG Working Group, and Director of the
Trace R&D Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: "WCAG 2.0 has
been developed with extensive community input. We've worked very hard,
including publishing twelve Working Drafts and addressing more than
3000 comments, in order to ensure that WCAG 2.0 meets the need for an
updated international standard with which national and local Web
accessibility guidelines can harmonize."

http://xml.coverpages.org/WCAGv20-CR.html
See also the WCAG 2 FAQ document: http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/wcag2faq.html

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Use XQuery from a Java Environment
Brett D. McLaughlin, IBM developerWorks

While the world of programming -- and particularly Java programming --
seems to increase, the number of standardized choices is growing as well.
In other words, more and more APIs blessed or approved by Sun are
available. The result of this standardization is that an increasing
number of developers are branching out beyond their core competencies,
and learning new technologies. High on the list of interesting and
worthwhile tools and APIs to master are those that deal with data. No
matter how cool or clever an application, it's ultimately only as useful
as its ability to work with data. And, while the number of APIs constantly
expands, the popular and commonly used number of data formats steadily
decreases. While some data managers still use object-oriented database
management systems, or XML-driven databases, relational databases
(RDBMSs) have weathered that storm, and still seem the choice of most
data managers. That leaves the Java developer with JDBC (for database
connectivity) or perhaps JDO (Java Data Objects) to interact with SQL
databases. Data not in databases has also almost all standardized on
XML as a data format. XML is robust, albeit verbose, and there are
perhaps more APIs for working with XML than any other non-Java medium
in the language. Whether it's parsing, data binding, or transforming,
if your application can't deal with XML, then it's considered limited
and perhaps even a bit behind the times. These two seemingly unrelated
facts -- the propensity for data to live in SQL databases and the
popularity of XML for all data outside of a database -- has created
some unique problems, though. SQL databases are easy to query; XML
documents are not. Consumers expect to be able to search through data
easily, and while this works nicely with data in databases, it's not
so trivial with data in XML documents. Obviously, taking XML-formatted
data and dumping it into a database just to make searching easier is
the wrong approach. And that's where XQuery -- and as a corollary, the
XQuery API for Java (XQJ) comes in... The power of XQuery is now
available to Java programmers without resorting to system calls or
unwieldy APIs, all in a Sun-standardized package.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xjavaxquery/
See also JSR 225, XQuery API for Java (XQJ): http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=225

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TIBCO Proactive Management Approach Enables SOA as a Managed Service
Dana Gardner, ZDNet Blog

A series of announcements from TIBCO Software's user conference, TUCON
in San Francisco, underscores the need for SOA support and performance
management to gain maturity, and for those scaling up SOA activities
to now look for the means to provide mission-critical performance in
all circumstances. TIBCO rolled out ActiveMatrix Service Performance
Manager, which helps companies predict and fix IT problems. The
performance management support, which maps dependencies and supports
SLA-based delivery, is designed to play well with SOA governance, an
important part of taking SOA governance to the next level. TIBCO is
also delivering an 'ultra-low latency' message delivery support with
its first messaging appliance. Proper performance demands raw horsepower,
in addition to the finesse of dependencies mapping and vulnerability
predictions. Two intriguing partnership announcements: TIBCO has
partnered with Microsoft on SOA adoption paths, and TIBCO has selected
Microsoft Silverlight for building and delivering rich Internet
applications, which builds on TIBCO'S AJAX development. Secondly, TIBCO
is partnering with BMC Software, in that BMC will use TIBCO
infrastructure as the SOA foundation for its Business Service Management
Platform. The need to detect behaviors and patterns in ongoing SOA-based
processes and transactions will provide the confidence and transparency
large organizations require to build out SOA systems and methods across
more business critical activities. Complex event processing offers a
key ingredient for this SOA forensics value to occur.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/?p=2653
See also the InfoWorld article: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/30/Tibco-backing-Microsoft-Silverlight_1.html

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OASIS Members Propose Creation of DITA Adoption Subcommittee
Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC Mebers, Proposal

Members of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee have published a draft
Statement of Purpose for an OASIS DITA Adoption Subcommittee. The OASIS
DITA Adoption Subcommittee members will collaborate to provide expertise
and resources to educate the marketplace on the value of the DITA OASIS
Standard. By raising awareness of the benefits offered by DITA, the
Subcommittee increases the demand for and availability of DITA
conforming products and services, resulting in a greater choice of tools
and platforms and expanding the DITA community of users, suppliers, and
consultants. By advancing the adoption of DITA through OASIS, the
Subcommittee members will: (1) Collaborate within the security of the
OASIS open process; (2) Maximize message credibility by working on
behalf of a vendor-neutral standards consortium; (3) Build on existing
market awareness of OASIS as the source of DITA; (4) Leverage the
combined resources of all participants; (5) Reinforce DITA as the result
of an open, transparent process guided by multiple vendors, communities,
and individuals; (6) Openly share content and coordinate program
execution with other entities that share a common or similar statement
of purpose on a worldwide scope. OASIS DITA Adoption Subcommittee
activities would include a range of activities, for example: providing
oversight for the DITA XML.org Focus Area, staging interoperability
and/or proof-of-concept demonstrations at industry conferences,
monitoring accuracy of DITA references in commonly used resources such
as Wikipedia, producing OASIS-branded primers, white papers, position
papers, slide presentations, datasheets, and other collateral...

http://xml.coverpages.org/DITA-Adoption-Subcommittee.html
See also DITA references: http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html

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XML Daily Newslink and Cover Pages are sponsored by:

BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com
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