XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 01 February 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 01 February 2007
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:

* IBM Research Projects Cover SOA, Web 2.0
* W3C Issues Last Call Working Draft for mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0
* OASIS WS-SX Technical Committee Issues Specifications for Adoption as
  OASIS Standards
* Zend Seeks A Sustainable Open-Source Model
* Sun Announces Multi-Language Support for NetBeans IDE Version 5.5
* SOA Solutions Provider Active Endpoints To Support WS-BPEL 2.0
* How Many Contradictions Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?

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IBM Research Projects Cover SOA, Web 2.0
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

IBM showed off research efforts in a number of areas, including SOA,
wikis, and mashups, at its IBM Silicon Valley Lab on Wednesday afternoon.
Technologies on display leveraged concepts like social networking,
collaboration, and Web 2.0. Security and healthcare systems also were
on display. The 26 projects viewed were in various stages of development,
ranging from incubation to actual availability. In the SOA area, IBM's
Request Driven Provisioning technology provides a framework to offer
business services in an SOA. It combines automated systems with
business processes for the purpose of end-to-end IT service delivery.
Services are provisioned based on user requirements, said Willy Chiu,
IBM vice president for High Performance On Demand Solutions in the
company's Software Group. "What we're doing is allowing a business unit
to define its requirements for a complete SOA system that would have
taken months to install and now it takes hours," said Chiu. The
technology is available as a service offering that leverages IBM's
WebSphere, Tivoli, Rational, and other product lines. DB2 provides for
data storage. Also in SOA, IBM touted Sonoma, which is a Web-based
capacity planning tool. To be offered through a Saas (Software as a
Service) model, it will enable customers to size SOA-based workloads
to meet future performance and scalability requirements. Sonoma is the
latest version of the company's OPERA (On Demand Performance Advisor)
tool for capacity planning. Projects demonstrated under the umbrella
of social networking, collaboration, and Web 2.0 included: (1)
Information Factory, a portal-based system for organizing feedback
from customers. Wikis, blogs, social networking, and tagging tools
are used to accelerate collaboration. (2) Koala, a social engineering
effort allowing non-programmers to easily automate processes on the
Web in a collaborative environment using wiki-like collaborative
authoring and semantic Web annotation. Reusable procedures can be
developed and reused by recording keystrokes and clicks as a user
completes a task. (3) Fringe, transforming IBM's internal directory
into a corporate social networking site. Activities and relationships
can be organized around people and experiments with the application
of social networking and tagging principles. (4) QEDwiki (quick and
easily done wiki), an enterprise mashup tool that makes it easy for
non-technical persons to build Web-based applications that blend
company data with outside Web services. (5) Mashups for the Enterprise,
which are applications developed to solve a situational business
problem by integrating Internet/intranet data and services using
lightweight Web 2.0 technologies.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/31/HNibmlabs_1.html

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W3C Issues Last Call Working Draft for mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0
Sean Owen and Jo Rabin (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group has announced the release
of a Last Call Working Draft for the "W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0"
specification. The document includes a set of editors notes on which
feedback would be appreciated, in particular on the UTF-8 requirement.
The Working Group would also like feedback from Web content developers
on the perceived difficulty of getting the mobileOK Basic status as
described in this document. Comments are welcome through 6-March-2007.
While becoming increasingly popular, mobile Web access today still
suffers from interoperability and usability problems. W3C's Mobile Web
Initiative (W3C MWI) addresses these issues through a concerted effort
of key players in the mobile production chain, including authoring tool
vendors, content providers, handset manufacturers, browser vendors and
mobile operators. The "W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0" document defines
the tests that provide the basis for making a claim of W3C mobileOK
Basic conformance and are based on W3C Mobile Web Best Practices. Content
which passes the tests has taken some steps to provide a functional
user experience  for users of basic mobile devices whose capabilities
at least match those of the Default Delivery Context (DDC). mobileOK
Basic is the lesser of two levels of claim, the greater level being
mobileOK, described separately. Claims to be W3C mobileOK Basic
compliant are represented using content labels, also described
separately. mobileOK assesses interoperability. It does not measure
usability and does not address the important goal of assessing whether
users of more advanced devices enjoy a richer user experience than is
possible using the DDC.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-mobileOK-basic10-tests-20070130/
See also the Mobile Web Initiative: http://www.w3.org/Mobile/

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OASIS WS-SX Technical Committee Issues Specifications for Adoption as
OASIS Standards
Staff, OASIS Announcement

The OASIS Web Services Secure Exchange (WS-SX) Technical Committee has
submitted a "WS-Trust 1.3" and "WS-SecureConversation 1.3" specification
set for consideration as an OASIS Standard.  The WS-SX TC was chartered
to define extensions to OASIS Web Services Security to enable trusted
SOAP message exchanges involving multiple message exchanges and to
define security policies that govern the formats and tokens of such
messages. This work has been carried out through continued refinement
of the Web Services SecureConversation, SecurityPolicy and Trust
specifications submitted to the TC. The "WS-Trust" specification uses
the base mechanisms of WS-Security and defines additional primitives and
extensions for  security token exchange to enable the issuance and
dissemination of credentials within different trust domains. Specifically,
WS-Trust provides methods for issuing, renewing, and validating security
tokens and ways to establish assess the presence of, and broker trust
relationships. The "WS-SecureConversation" specification defines
extensions to allow security context establishment and sharing, and
session key derivation.  This allows contexts to be established and
potentially more efficient keys or new key material to be exchanged,
thereby increasing the overall performance and security of the subsequent
exchanges.  The security context is defined as a new WS-Security token
type that is obtained using a binding of WS-Trust.

http://docs.oasis-open.org/ws-sx/ws-trust/200512/ws-trust-1.3-spec-cs-01.htm
http://docs.oasis-open.org/ws-sx/ws-secureconversation/200512/ws-secureconversation-1.3-spec-cs-01.htm

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Zend Seeks A Sustainable Open-Source Model
Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com

Open-source software company Zend Technologies, hoping to double its
revenue this year, says it will narrow its focus to big business and
Web 2.0-style start-ups, according to incoming CEO Harold Goldberg.
Venture-backed Zend makes development tools for running Web applications
written with PHP, an open-source scripting language. As it seeks to
grow beyond its current size -- with annual revenue between $10 million
and $30 million -- Goldberg said he intends to focus the company on a
handful of growth initiatives, down from eight or nine now. He said
the obvious routes are doubling efforts to sell to corporations and
governments, particularly in Europe, where open-source applications
and standards are gaining favor. Because PHP is used in millions of
Web sites, so-called Web 2.0 start-ups are another potential focus for
company sales. The company is also filling out its product line, which
includes development tools and software for running PHP applications.
This month, it intends to release Zend Core, a certified version of
the PHP language that includes software to optimize PHP applications
to work with Oracle and IBM databases, as well as Microsoft's Windows.
With the business software industry consolidated around a handful of
very large companies, many companies formed over the past five years
have bet on free products and open-source business models to undercut
the giants.

http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-6155349.html
See also the company web site: http://www.zend.com/

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Sun Announces Multi-Language Support for NetBeans IDE Version 5.5
Staff, Sun Microsystems Announcement

Sun Microsystems has announced the availability of the NetBeans 5.5
Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Japanese, Simplified
Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese and Traditional Chinese. In addition,
the NetBeans Translation Project has received numerous other language
contributions including: Albanian, Azerbaijani, Czech, Dutch, French,
German, Greek, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. A number of these
language translations are the result of interest from Java User Groups
around the world. The recent release of the NetBeans 5.5 IDE in
Brazilian Portuguese is a testament to the efforts of NetBeans
community members and Java technology developers who collaborated
through the NetBeans Translation Project to help localize the IDE
for their fellow developers. Michel Graciano, a software developer
of KSI Solucoes em Informatica and member of SouJava, a large
Brazilian Java User Group, was the project lead for the Brazilian
Portuguese translation. NetBeans 5.5 IDE in Traditional Chinese was
done completely by Chin-Lung (James) Yu of Taiwan, who is currently
a PhD student in the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology
at UCLA The NetBeans IDE is a free, open-source Integrated Development
Environment for software developers. The IDE runs on many platforms
including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and the MacOS. It is easy to
install and use straight out of the box. The NetBeans IDE provides
developers with all the tools they need to create professional
cross-platform desktop, enterprise, web and mobile applications.
NetBeans IDE 5.5 builds on the success of NetBeans 5.0 and adds
support for Java EE 5 and Sun Java System Application Server PE 9.
Got Web 2.0? Of course! NetBeans 5.5 generates JAX-WS 2.0 artifacts
for Java SE 6 and Java EE 5 projects.  The NetBeans Enterprise Pack
provides support for creating Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
applications, including XML schema tools, a WSDL editor, and a BPEL
editor for web services orchestration.

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-01/sunflash.20070131.1.xml
See also the NetBeans Translation Project: http://translatedfiles.netbeans.org/

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SOA Solutions Provider Active Endpoints To Support WS-BPEL 2.0
Staff, SOAWorld Magazine News Desk

Active Endpoints, provider of SOA orchestration products and services,
announced the availability of ActiveBPEL 3.0. The ActiveBPEL product
family includes open source and commercial SOA orchestration solutions
that are standards-compliant and platform-neutral, forming the
foundation for fast, cost-effective business and systems integration.
Among other important capabilities, ActiveBPEL 3.0 comprehensively
supports the forthcoming WS-BPEL 2.0 standard, which will be officially
published early in 2007. ActiveBPEL 3.0 allows SOA application
developers and ISVs to leverage the power of the BPEL 2.0 standard
while preserving prior investments in BPEL 1.1 processes. ActiveBPEL
3.0's pluggable architecture complements all SOA IT infrastructures
and offers an independent, best-in-class solution for building, testing,
deploying and managing BPEL-based applications. Enterprise developers
and systems integrators use ActiveBPEL to significantly reduce the time
and complexity of implementing SOA applications, from proof of concept
to deployment. A large and growing group of businesses now use
ActiveBPEL in demanding environments across financial services,
government, telecommunications, and other industries. ActiveBPEL is
also the embedded, best-in-class BPEL solution for many leading
software providers who look to Active Endpoints for competitive
advantages when including BPEL in their own products. In response to
input from hundreds of customers and partners, ActiveBPEL 3.0 offers
new capabilities including: (1) Support for all WS-BPEL 2.0 process
constructs and semantics; (2) Automatic migration of BPEL4WS 1.1
processes to the new WS-BPEL 2.0 standard, preserving users'
investments in existing 1.1 processes; (3) Seamless, side-by-side
execution of BPEL4WS 1.1 and WS-BPEL 2.0 processes, allowing phased
migration to WS-BPEL 2.0; (4) Enhanced message routing based on
WS-Addressing to streamline and improve the execution of long running
processes; (5) Policy-driven message exchanges based on
WS-ReliableMessaging; (6) BPEL Sub-process execution, allowing process
components to be executed within the lifecycle of their invoking
processes.

http://java.sys-con.com/read/312289.htm
See also the OASIS TC: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsbpel/

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How Many Contradictions Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?
Andy Updegrove, ConsortiumInfo.org Blog

As those who are following Microsoft's OOXML formats through the
standardization process will know, those formats (now officially known
as Ecma 376, following the favorable adoption vote in Ecma on December
7 of last year) are now in the "contradiction" phase in JTC 1 at ISO/IEC.
Or, so it would seem, they are in the "so, what is a contradiction,
anyway?" phase. Microsoft has won the first point in this match (on
which more below), as national bodies around the world wrestle with
this question. The question of what a "contradiction" may be under the
ISO/IEC rules is of more than passing interest.  On the most basic level,
the question is legitimate, since ISO/IEC apparently do not supply a
precise definition, even though one out of the six months in the ISO/IEC
Fast Track process is allocated to the submission of contradictions by
the 60-odd Principal and Observer members of these global standards
organizations that are entitled to respond during this phase. Yesterday,
I learned that the Executive Board of INCITS decided earlier in the day
not to propose to ANSI that any contradictions need be identified
between OOXML and any ISO/IEC standards, Directives or other rules.
The reason is that Microsoft, which has a member on the committee, has
persuaded a sufficient number of members of the INCITS Executive Board
to adopt a very conservative definition for a "contradiction."

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20070131184453743
See also Biran Jones: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/01/31/openxml-links-to-wrap-up-january-07.aspx

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