XML Daily Newslink. Monday, 20 November 2006

[Robin Cover <robin@oasis-open.org>]

XML Daily Newslink. Monday, 20 November 2006
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:

* XProc: An XML Pipeline Language
* Step By Step: Why XML Pipelines Make Sense
* Last Call Review for Web Services Policy 1.5
* IBM Offers New Single Sign-On Tool for SMBs
* JBoss Sets Sights on Open-Source SOA Supremacy with ESB
* Long View of IT Oversight

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XProc: An XML Pipeline Language
Norman Walsh and Alex Milowski (eds.). W3C Technical Report

W3C's XML Processing Model Working Group has released an updated Working
Draft for the "XProc: An XML Pipeline Language: specification. Used to
control and organize the flow of documents, the XProc language
standardizes interactions, inputs and outputs for transformations for
the large group of specifications such as XSLT, XML Schema, XInclude
and Canonical XML that operate on and produce XML documents. A pipeline
consists of components. Like pipelines, components take zero or more
XML documents as their input and produce zero or more XML documents as
their output. The inputs to a component come from the web, from the
pipeline document, from the inputs to the pipeline itself, or from the
outputs of other components in the pipeline. The outputs from a component
are consumed by other components, are outputs of the pipeline as a whole,
or are discarded.  Major changes in this version, according to Norm
Walsh: (1) The semantics have been rewritten so that they're declarative
but without reference to a rather amorphous 'flow graph'; (2) The 'declare-'
forms of the input, output, and parameter elements are gone. Depending on
the context, those statements are declaring, binding, or declaring-and-
binding. (3) The source attribute no longer has two parts, thus, no
microparsing.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-xproc-20061117/
See also the Norm Walsh blog: http://norman.walsh.name/2006/11/17/xprocwd

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Step By Step: Why XML Pipelines Make Sense
Kurt Cagle, O'Reilly Articles

The idea behind [W3C] XProc is simple enough: you create an XML document
that provides 'glue' or conditional bindings for difference processes that
can occur in an application. One such 'standard' project for such a
language already exists (Ant), and I find it interesting that Ant has
been slowly replacing the cryptic and awkward make syntax in an increasing
number of applications, only a small portion of which are XML based.
Pipelines are the logical mechanism to do that. By encoding them in XML,
you can pass the process descriptors to the necessary processors without
having to worry about what processing language those processors are using.
Pipelines by themselves are fundamentally acyclic - they have definitive
endpoints, but a good process flow architect also realizes that by placing
two pipelines together what you end up creating is a circuit. If you have
a pipeline language that can realistically handle asychronous invocation
over the short term (which is a fundamental flaw in Ant, as it is
(I believe) a synchronous application) then ultimately the only synchronous
points that you need come when one pipeline hands off its results to
another pipeline. Pipelines are fundamentally RESTian in nature: they
concentrate on the interactions of 'molecular' conduits, and while the
characteristics of the individual 'atomic' servers are important, without
some formal overriding governor at the molecular level more complex
structures become ever harder to build and maintain, and the atoms
themselves remain largely isolated.

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/11/step_by_step_why_xml_pipelines.html

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Last Call Review for Web Services Policy 1.5
Asir Vedamuthu, David Orchard, Maryann Hondo (et al.), W3C Working Draft

W3C has released Last Call Working Drafts for the Web Services Policy
1.5 specification. The Working Drafts were produced by the members of
the Web Services Policy Working Group, which is part of the W3C Web
Services Activity. The Working Group expects to advance the Working
Drafts to Recommendation Status. Comments are welcome through
12-January-2007. The Working Group is tracking all comments via Bugzilla
and highly prefers to receive comments via this system. Changes in these
drafts include ignorable policy assertions, an Internet media type, and
a request for feedback on adding versioning guidance. "Web Services
Policy 1.5 - Framework" defines a framework and a model for expressing
policies that refer to domain-specific capabilities, requirements, and
general characteristics of entities in a Web services-based system. A
policy is a collection of policy alternatives, where a policy
alternative is a collection of policy assertions. A policy assertion
represents an individual requirement, capability, or other property of
a behavior. A policy expression is an XML Infoset representation of a
policy, either in a normal form or in an equivalent compact form. Some
policy assertions specify traditional requirements and capabilities
that will ultimately manifest on the wire (e.g., authentication scheme,
transport protocol selection). Other policy assertions have no wire
manifestation yet are critical to proper service selection and usage
(e.g., privacy policy, QoS characteristics). Web Services Policy 1.5 -
Framework provides a single policy language to allow both kinds of
assertions to be expressed and evaluated in a consistent manner. Web
Services Policy 1.5 - Framework does not specify policy discovery or
policy attachments. A policy attachment is a mechanism for associating
policy with one or more policy scopes, where a policy scope is a
collection of policy subjects to which a policy may apply. A policy
subject is an entity (e.g., an endpoint, message, resource, interaction)
with which a policy can be associated. Other specifications are free
to define technology-specific mechanisms for associating policy with
various entities and resources. "Web Services Policy 1.5 - Attachment"
defines such mechanisms.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-ws-policy-20061117/
See also the W3C news item: http://www.w3.org/News/2006#item225

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IBM Offers New Single Sign-On Tool for SMBs
Peter Sayer, InfoWorld

IBM has added a new single sign-on tool to its Tivoli software range
to make life easier for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) to
link their Web sites with those of partners and customers. Single
sign-on tools aim to save users the trouble of remembering separate
passwords for each service they use, and simplify life for systems
administrators by using a single identity store to control access to
multiple services. One advantage of the system for small businesses is
that they can use the software to federate their systems with those of
their larger partners, leaving the lion's share of the administration
to their partners, IBM said. IBM is competing with suppliers such as
Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and RSA Security (now part of EMC) to
offer federated identity management tools. But IBM is also cooperating
with those companies, and others, to develop standards to enable
communication between them -- a necessity if identity management is to
be truly "federated." The Tivoli software uses SAML (Security Assertions
Markup Language) version 1.0 and 1.1, WS-Federation (Web
Services-Federation) and WS-Trust to communicate with identity
providers and service providers. Based on IBM's WebSphere Application
Server 6.1, Federated Identity Manager Business Gateway can connect to
applications built with J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) or
Microsoft's .Net.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/11/20/HNibmsignontool_1.html

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JBoss Sets Sights on Open-Source SOA Supremacy with ESB
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

At JBoss World Berlin, the company's annual European conference, JBoss,
a division of Red Hat, flexed its middleware muscle and made a series
of announcements aimed at making Red Hat the place to go for the
premier open-source SOA platform. The company announced its new JBoss
ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), which rounds out the JEMS (JBoss
Enterprise Middleware Suite). In addition, JBoss announced new features
expected to appear in the next version of its popular application server,
JBoss Application Server 5.0, and Red Hat announced plans to combine a
virtualized operating system with its set of building blocks for SOA
as a strategy for creating greater value for the company's customers
next year. JBoss officials said the ESB technology comes with a
three-year track record in handling complex integration and real-time
events in a mission-critical business environment with 3,000 employees
across 40 locations serving 2 million customers.  In addition, the new
JBoss ESB leverages other JEMS technologies, such as the JBoss Rules
business rules engine for content-based routing and JBossMQ for
messaging. Over time, JBoss plans to extend JBoss ESB with additional
JEMS products such as the JBoss jBPM business process management and
workflow engine, the company said. And the company will work with
partners to expand the JBoss ESB with complementary technologies.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2061466,00.asp

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Long View of IT Oversight
Joab Jackson, Government Computer News

Like all agencies, the Food and Drug Administration faces the challenge
of getting a handle on its many IT purchases. These acquisitions
stretch across numerous programs and dozens of technologies. To ease
the task of understanding and analyzing such investments, FDA's Office
of the Chief Information Officer uses portfolio management software.
For FDA, switching the data over to portfolio management software was
initially a chore. Office personnel first took all the existing
spreadsheets and documents and cut and pasted the information into the
program. Since that first year, though, the information arrives at the
data repository directly from the program officials themselves, because
the data can be entered via Web browser.  For portfolio management, the
office used ProSight Portfolios, and a number of related products from
ProSight Inc. of Portland, Ore. The package can correlate all that
Exhibit 300 information. Once all the input data is gathered, the
software generates a full XML Exhibit 300 report, ready to submit to
OMB. In addition, the software can channel the data through live
executive dashboards, showing the metrics in pie charts, score cards and
other data formats. IT portfolio management went far beyond tidying up
the Exhibit 300 process, though. The software also allows the office to
double-check how well IT investments align with its own business goals.
It also helps FDA make more strategic IT purchasing decisions.

http://www.gcn.com/print/25_33/42601-1.html
See also Exhibit 300 XML Schema: http://www.whitehouse.gov/OMB/egov/e-5-documents.html

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