XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 13 December 2006

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

XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 13 December 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
SAP AG  http://www.sap.com

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HEADLINES:

* Google Open-Sources AJAX Toolkit
* IBM, Yahoo Launch Free Enterprise Search Tool
* The Atom Publishing Protocol: Introducing the Apache Abdera Project
* Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces
* OASIS TC Releases WS-SecurityPolicy Version 1.2
* Using Custom Events and Writing XML with the StAX Serializer API
* OpenOffice.org 2.1 Released
* UK National Health Service (NHS) National Programme for Information
  Technology Uses ebXML Messaging

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Google Open-Sources AJAX Toolkit
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

Google Inc has open-sourced its tool set for building Web applications,
the Google Web Toolkit.  According to a notice issued by Chris Ulbrich,
a spokesperson for Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, the company has
open-sourced the GWT 1.3 release candidate. Previous versions of the
GWT were only partly open-sourced. Bruce Johnson, technical lead for
GWT: "Today is quite a milestone for Google Web Toolkit: with the GWT
1.3 Release Candidate, our team is very happy to announce that all of
GWT is open source under the Apache 2.0 license." Google introduced GWT
last May as a free development framework for writing AJAX (Asynchronous
JavaScript and XML) Web applications in the Java language. The toolset
features a debugging browser and a Java-to-JavaScript compiler. [Chris]
Ulbrich said Google will be making the Google Web Toolkit development
process completely transparent, meaning that design discussions,
feature prioritization, bug fixing and roadmap planning will be done in
an open Google Group. [Release Notes for 1.3 Release Candidate 1.3.1:
"This is the Release Candidate for GWT 1.3, the first completely open
source version of GWT. This version has no new functionality, but we
did make a lot of changes to get the source code and build scripts into
presentable shape to prepare for ongoing open source development... the
new GWT open source charter describes how we plan to operate the
project and how you can access the GWT source, compile it yourself, and
contribute... GWT took off much faster than we expected, and it quickly
became clear that the most sensible way to advance GWT quickly would be
to open it sooner rather than later. While we've never actually felt
particularly stingy about keeping the source closed, now the all code
for the GWT Java to JavaScript compiler, the hosted mode browser, and
so on can progress before your eyes. We're very much looking forward
to contributions of ideas, bug reports, and patches."]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2071602,00.asp
See also the GWT open source charter: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/makinggwtbetter.html

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IBM, Yahoo Launch Free Enterprise Search Tool
Juan Carlos Perez, InfoWorld

IBM and Yahoo have developed a free, entry-level, enterprise search
application that at least one analyst believes will seriously disrupt
the low-end segment of this market where Google has been selling many
of its Mini search devices. IBM and Yahoo plan to release the server-
side application on Wednesday as a free download aimed at companies
that haven't tried out enterprise search due to cost and complexity
concerns. The software, called IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition, has been
designed to be simple to install and use, and can index up to 500,000
documents from over 200 file types, like Adobe Systems' PDF and
Microsoft's Word and Excel.  With that indexing capacity, IBM OmniFind
Yahoo Edition poses a significant threat the Google Mini, an analyst
said. The Mini is a hardware device loaded with Google search software
that starts at $1,995 for 50,000 documents and tops out at 300,000
documents in its $8,995 edition. According to the developer blog from
Andreas Neumann, "The goal of IBM Yahoo! Enterprise Edition is to
provide easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use search software right out of the
box. Lucene is a Java library for indexing and searching text documents.
But it cannot operate by itself -- it is only one of many components
that make up a search engine. It needs crawlers to gather documents:
we took the web crawler from IBM OmniFind Enterprise Edition and made
it more robust and easier to configure. Lucene needs text analytics to
prepare the documents for indexing -- we use IBM's world class
LanguageWare text analytics software and the Unstructured Information
Management Architecture (UIMA)."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/12/13/HNibmyahoosearch_1.html
See also the announcement: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/20767.wss

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The Atom Publishing Protocol: Introducing the Apache Abdera Project
James Snell, IBM developerWorks

Earlier articles in this series provided an overview of the Atom
Publishing Protocol and described the various ways it is being utilized
in real world applications. This article begins to demonstrate how you
can start to implement Atom-enabled applications using a new open-
source project, called Abdera, currently under incubation at the
Apache Software Foundation. It looks at the core features of the
Apache Abdera project, including its Feed Object Model, XPath and
XSLT support, extension handling and incremental parsing model. A
subsequent installment of this series introduces and demonstrates the
support for the Atom Publishing Protocol currently being developed.
The goal of the Apache Abdera project is to build a functionally-
complete, high-performance implementation of the IETF Atom Syndication
Format (RFC 4287) and Atom Publishing Protocol (in-progress)
specifications. Abdera is an effort undergoing incubation at the Apache
Software Foundation (ASF), sponsored by the Apache Incubator PMC.
Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further
review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision
making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other
successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a
reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does
indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.
Abdera 0.2.0 was released on December 5th, 2006, featuring, for example:
(1) A reworked API that improves usability; (2) Decoupled extensions
from the underlying parser implementation; (3) A Atom Publishing Protocol
client implementation; (4) Updated support for the current
Atom Publishing Protocol draft specification; (5) Improved Thread
Safety; (6) Improved Javadocs; (7) Added experimental Bidirectional
Text support; (8) Improved implementation of OpenSearch v1.0 and v1.1
extensions; (9) Implementation of MediaRSS extensions; (10)
Implementation of Feed Paging and Archiving extensions; (11) GoogleLogin
Authentication Support.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-atompp3/
See also Atom references: http://xml.coverpages.org/atom.html

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Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces
Jim Barnett, Michael Bodell, et al. (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C's Multimodal Interaction Working Group has released a third
Working Draft for the "Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces"
specification. The document describes a loosely coupled architecture
for multimodal user interfaces, which allows for co-resident and
distributed implementations, and focuses on the role of markup and
scripting, and the use of well defined interfaces between its
constituents. The MMI Working Group is aware that multimodal
interfaces are an area of active research and that commercial
implementations are only beginning to emerge. Therefore we do not
view our goal as standardizing a hypothetical existing common
practice, but rather providing a platform to facilitate innovation
and technical development. Thus the aim of this design is to provide
a general and flexible framework providing interoperability among
modality-specific components from different vendors -- for example,
speech recognition from one vendor and handwriting recognition from
another. This framework places very few restrictions on the individual
components or on their interactions with each other, but instead
focuses on providing a general means for allowing them to communicate
with each other, plus basic infrastructure for application control
and platform services. The main difference from the second draft is
a more detailed specification of the events sent between the Runtime
Framework and the Modality Components. Future versions of this
document will further refine the event definitions , while related
documents will address the issue of markup for multimodal applications.
In particular those related documents will address the issue of markup
for the Interaction Manager, either adopting and adapting existing
languages or defining new ones for the purpose.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-mmi-arch-20061211/
See also W3C Multimodal Interaction Activity: http://www.w3.org/2002/mmi/

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OASIS TC Releases WS-SecurityPolicy Version 1.2
Anthony Nadalin, Marc Goodner, et al. (eds), Public Review Draft

Members of the  OASIS Web Services Secure Exchange (WS-SX) Technical
Committee have published an approved draft of "WS-SecurityPolicy 1.2"
for public review, ending 10-February-2007.  This specification
indicates the policy assertions for use with WS-Policy which apply to
WSS: SOAP Message Security, WS-Trust, and WS-SecureConversation. It
defines a framework for allowing web services to express their
constraints and requirements.  Such constraints and requirements are
expressed as policy assertions. The document takes the approach of
defining a base set of assertions that describe how messages are to be
secured. Flexibility with respect to token types, cryptographic
algorithms and mechanisms used, including using transport level
security is part of the design and allows for evolution over time.
The intent is to provide enough information for compatibility and
interoperability to be determined by web service participants along
with all information necessary to actually enable a participant to
engage in a secure exchange of messages. It is a goal of the security
policy model to leverage the WS-Policy framework's intersection
algorithm for  selecting policy alternatives and the attachment
mechanism for associating policy assertions with web service artifacts.
Consequently, wherever possible, the security policy assertions do not
use parameters or attributes. This enables first-level, QName based
assertion matching without security domain-specific knowledge to be done
at the framework level. The first level matching is intended to provide
a narrowed set of policy alternatives that are shared by the two
parties attempting to establish a secure communication path.

http://docs.oasis-open.org/ws-sx/ws-securitypolicy/200512
See also the PDF: http://docs.oasis-open.org/ws-sx/ws-securitypolicy/200512/ws-securitypolicy-1.2-spec-cd-01.pdf

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Using Custom Events and Writing XML with the StAX Serializer API
Peter Nehrer, IBM developerWorks

This article (Part 3) examines customization techniques that use
application-defined events. In particular, you'll see how to create
custom event classes and use them to process XML with the event
iterator-based API. Last but not least, you'll review the serialization
API provided by StAX for writing XML as a stream of tokens as well as
event objects. Because the pull-based approach used by StAX leaves the
application in control of the parsing process, nothing precludes you
from converting the parsed events into application-specific model
objects (such as, proprietary messages, or other structural building
blocks). However, you might find it more convenient to stay in the realm
of events and simply create customized events to represent more complex
structures in your XML content. By super-imposing your custom types over
their underlying XML data structures, you can simplify the development
of your application code while allowing the lower layers to still work
with these types as event objects  -- and, for instance, write them out
into an output stream as events. The StAX event hierarchy is open-ended.
You can extend the existing events, and define your own event types that
are new altogether. Because event objects are defined as Java interfaces
rather than classes, you have a lot freedom in how you implement them.
For example, you can subclass your existing object model and represent
each type as an event. You can also do the same through composition,
delegation, and so on. Representing XML streams as a series of event
objects is in particular a powerful approach that offers both
flexibility and efficiency. With StAX as part of the next release of
Java Standard Edition, it will finally be at every Java developer's
disposal.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-stax3.html
See also JSR 173, Streaming API for XML: http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=173

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OpenOffice.org 2.1 Released
Andy Updegrove, Consortium Info

The news on the ODF front continues to flow, as the air wars continue
between ODF and OOXML.  This morning's email includes a message from
OpenOffice.org's Louis Suarez-Potts to those interested in the progress
of OOo's ODF compliant, open source software suite.  That message
announces the third OOo release of 2006, versioned as OpenOffice.org
2.1.  The following is taken from Louis's email: "There are a number of
important new features for users in this release. The presentations
application, Impress, now supports multiple monitors, with the presenter
choosing where to display the presentation. The Calc spreadsheet has an
improved HTML export  capability, using styles to better recreate in a
browser the  appearance of the original spreadsheet. The database
application, Base, has a number of enhancements, including improved
support for  Microsoft's Access product. The popular Quickstarter is now
available  for GNU/Linux users as a GTK application. OpenOffice.org's
impressive  language support is enhanced with five more localisations."
Version 2.1 also provides new support for developers, extending version
control to extensions, simplifying the management of packages for those
developing extensions.  And, for those wanting to take advantage of new
features as they become available between releases, 2.1 includes "an
improved on-line notifier, which checks regularly and informs users if a
new version is available (users may choose to disable this option at any
time)."

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20061212053015310
See also ODF references: http://xml.coverpages.org/odf.html

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UK National Health Service (NHS) National Programme for Information
Technology Uses ebXML Messaging
Pim van der Eijk, Posting to ebXML-Dev List

Quoting Pim van der Eijk: "I'm pleased to announce that a new case study
was posted at the ebXML.org Web site. The UK's National Programme for
Information Technology (NPfIT) is the world's largest civil IT project.
A central component of the NHS Care Records Service is the Transactional
Messaging Service (TMS) Spine using the ebXML Messaging Service OASIS
Standard. The Transaction and Messaging Service provides the
communications infrastructure for the National Programme. It serves to
interconnect regional network clusters managed by Local Service
Providers (LSPs) and national services such as systems for electronic
booking and transmission of prescriptions. The technology framework used
for TMS is based on a large number of advanced technical specifications
and standards. This includes the ebXML Messaging Service OASIS Standard.
Within the TMS Spine, ebXML is used to provide reliable messaging
functionality. National services such as the Electronic Booking Service
(Choose and Book) and Electronic Transmission of Prescriptions are
accessed using pairs of XML request and response documents. These
documents are transported within the NHS network as ebXML messages. With
an anticipated yearly volume of over 5.000.000.000 message by 2010, TMS
is likely to be among the largest messaging systems in production in the
world. For this very reason, TMS is also likely to be among the larger
systems worldwide that will use the ebXML Messaging OASIS Standard."

http://edodds.blogs.com/conmergence/2006/12/uk_national_hea.html
See also OASIS ebXML.org: http://www.ebxml.org/

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