XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 08 February 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 08 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
IBM Corporation  http://www.ibm.com

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HEADLINES:

* Yahoo: Pipe in Data, Then Mash It Up
* Grid Initiatives Part 2
* ISO 639-3 Language Codes Released with SIL as Registration Authority
* Forrester Narrows List of Specs for Web Services
* Nokia Offers Free Mapping Program, Phone Search
* HP to Offer New Support Services to Users Adopting SAP's Enterprise
  SOA Approach
* Mozilla Updates Firefox 3.0 Preview
* XML Parsing Techniques With Perl: Tree Parsing and Event-Driven
  Parsing

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Yahoo: Pipe in Data, Then Mash It Up
Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com

Yahoo wants more mashups. The Web giant on Wednesday released Yahoo
Pipes, a hosted visual-development tool that lets people manipulate
data feeds from Web sites to create new applications. Mashup
applications combine data from different Web services; some of the
most popular mashups involve taking data from one source, such as real-
estate listings, and displaying them on Web-based mapping services.
With Yahoo Pipes, which is in beta, the company is trying to give
developers and tech-savvy users more power in combining structured data
feeds, typically done through the Really Simple Syndication or Atom
protocols. Although the service currently works only with RSS and Atom
feeds, Yahoo intends to expand the number of data sources with which
people can work. It also plans to allow third parties to create add-on
modules and to expand the service's information output composition to
include formats such as maps. For example, someone can use Yahoo Pipes
to combine multiple Web calendar feeds to display as one. He can
customize news alerts to filter through several news feeds, and he can
create an individualized eBay price watcher that monitors an RSS feed
to find items within a certain price range. The technical inspiration
for Yahoo Pipes comes from Unix, an operating system with which
programmers can establish a pipeline of connected data sources.

http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-6157508.html
See also the Tim O'Reilly Blog: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/pipes_and_filte.html

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Grid Initiatives Part 2
Wolfgang Gentzsch, The Grid Today

While the Web offers easy access to mostly static information via
Hypertext, the Grid adds another fundamental layer to the Internet,
by enabling direct access to and use of underlying resources, such
as computers, storage, scientific instruments and experiments, sensors,
applications, data, and  middleware services. Based on widely accepted
grid and web services standards, resources communicate with each other
and deliver results as services back to the user. These resources are
part of a service-oriented architecture, called OGSA, the Open Grid
Services. Simply speaking, grid middleware interconnects all the
distributed resources in a network. Light-weight software sensors,
often called daemons or agents, reside within each resource, monitoring
its status, providing resources with work, and reporting their status
back to the 'supervisor' software and then to the user. All interfaces
between the heterogeneous components (services) are standardized, e.g.,
via the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) and thus enable full
interoperability among them. Over the past 12 months, major grid
projects have been studied to better understand how to successfully
design, build, manage and operate large Community Grids, based on the
experience of early adopters and on case studies and lessons learned
from these grid projects.  In the first part of the article, we mainly
focus on the major results of our study on large community grid
initiatives: the lessons learned and the recommendations for those who
want to design, build and run similar grid infrastructures. This
article presents additional general information about these six grid
initiatives: The ChinaGrid, D-Grid, EGEE, NAREGI, TeraGrid, and the
UK e-Science Initiative.  In 2002, the Chinese Ministry of Education
(MoE) launched the largest grid project in China, called the ChinaGrid,
aiming at providing the nationwide grid computing platform and services
for research and education among 100 key universities in China. The
current version, CGSP 2.0, is based on Globus Toolkit 4.0, and is WSRF
and OGSA compatible. The full report is presented in "Grid Initiatives:
Lessons Learned and Recommendations" [Wolfgang Gentzsch, RENCI, Duke,
and D-Grid, January 21, 2007].

http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/1245130.html
See also the full report: http://www.renci.org/publications/reports/Grid_Initiatives_Jan_22_2007_final.doc

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ISO 639-3 Language Codes Released with SIL as Registration Authority
Staff, SIL Announcement

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has announced
the formal release of ISO 639-3 to comprehensively provide three-letter
codes for the world's languages. International communication requires
global standards that identify any given language. Unique codes are
useful for a variety of applications such as specifying the language
need for an interpreter or setting the language of an Internet web site.
For many of the world's minority languages, it serves not only to grant
bona fide recognition to the speakers, but also as an authoritative
crosscheck for researchers. ISO 639-3 provides a unique three-letter
code for 7,546 human languages, whether living, extinct, ancient,
historical or artificial. ISO 639-1 and -2 are existing standards
commissioned in the 1990s. The new standard, released February 5, 2007,
greatly expands upon the 478 codes formerly provided by ISO 639-2,
having the goal of comprehensive coverage for human languages. In 2002,
the ISO invited SIL International to propose an expanded list because
of its worldwide experience compiling data about minority languages for
the Ethnologue, which lists 6,912 living languages (15th edition). Most
of the additions from living and extinct languages were derived from
the Ethnologue. The additional ancient, historical or artificial
languages were obtained primarily from Linguist List. ISO 639-3 also
introduces the concept of one code for a 'macrolanguage' as well as
individual codes for each variety, a very useful feature for closely
related language clusters such as Chinese, Arabic or Cree. As the
Registration Authority, SIL International processes updates of
registered language codes and distributes information on pending and
adopted changes. Knowledge of languages at any point in time will
never be complete. Given the comprehensive nature of ISO 639-3, changes
to the code set are inevitable, especially in respect to lesser-known
languages. An updated version of the code set will be released once
each year.

http://www.sil.org/sil/news/2007/iso-639-3.htm
See also Language Identifiers: http://xml.coverpages.org/languageIdentifiers.html

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Forrester Narrows List of Specs for Web Services
Rich Seeley, SearchWebServices.com

Web services developers can spend time keeping track of all the
standards floating around or they can devote their time and energy to
the few they need for the project they are working on, which is the
advice analyst Randy Heffner offers. Heffner, vice president, Forrester
Research, Inc., has expended a lot of time the past few months studying
SOA and Web services specs and surveying developers working with them
and has concluded that conservative adopters working on core
connectivity need little more than SOAP and WSDL. He also has
recommendations for those he labels more aggressive, but he warns them
to look before they leap into a standard or spec where there is little
or no evidence that it will actually work in an application. "What it
really comes down to is how conservative are you as a technology adopter
and what immediate business value can you get from any of these specs,"
he said. "The more conservative you are then the fewer of these specs
you actually take a look at. If you're more aggressive then you better
be building budgets for prototyping and testing and proving these
things out before you commit to using them." Most Web services
developers will have to work out a balance between those two extremes,
he said. The standards and specifications for conservatives and those
for the more aggressive are identified in his Forrester report titled,
"Web Services Specifications: Core Web Services." For the conservative
developer, the list is short: SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, SOAP Messages with
Attachments, WS-I Basic Profile 1.0, and WS-I Basic Profile 1.1. While
SOAP and WSDL hark back to the early days of Web services, Heffner
said they provide the basic foundation on which myriad other standards,
proposed standards and vendor specifications rest. "The key way to
understand the growth of additional specifications is to view what SOAP
and WSDL give you as a core messaging model," he explained. "If you've
got two end points and they both support SOAP, and the development
environment supports WSDL, you get a basic connectivity. All the other
specs are about improving the quality of service of that basic
connection." Beyond keeping up with advances in SOAP and WSDL at W3C,
he recommends that developers keep an eye on what is happening at Web
Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I)...

http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1242859,00.html

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Nokia Offers Free Mapping Program, Phone Search
Nancy Gohring, InfoWorld

Nokia will give away mapping software to its customers as well as users
of Window Mobile devices. Phones based on Linux and older Nokia and
Microsoft devices will be supported in the future, the Finnish mobile
phone maker said.  Mobile users can download the Smart2go maps that
cover 150 countries and include 15 million points of interest, such as
restaurants and accommodation. Users can store the map data on a memory
card in the handset. The data can be downloaded over the air or via a
connection to a PC. Users of phones with GPS (global positioning service)
or with an external GPS module can subscribe to a turn-by-turn
navigation service. Subscriptions come in a variety of packages so
customers can pay for a week's worth of navigation services for use
while on holiday. Nokia is trying to compete with the personal navigation
device market but hopes to gain an edge in offering a different pricing
model. While standalone navigation device makers typically charge users
for the hardware and the maps up front, Nokia is giving the maps away
and charging for the navigation services as users need it. In January at
the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nokia announced that it
would start giving away maps to Nokia customers and offering a paid
navigation service. Nokia introduced another free offering on Thursday,
this one only for certain Nokia phones. Users of 16 Nokia devices, which
include the N95, N93, N71, N62 and N60, can download a free application
that lets them search for content on their handsets. Users can search
for information in calendar entries, SMS messages and multimedia files.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/08/HNnokiafreemapping_1.html
See also the announcement: http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1103306

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HP to Offer New Support Services to Users Adopting SAP's Enterprise SOA
Approach
China Martens, InfoWorld

Hewlett-Packard is offering more services supporting application vendor
SAP's SOA (service-oriented architecture) approach to IT as part of the
companies' increasingly close relationship. HP has committed to make
available a variety of new services to support users as they move to
adopt SAP's Enterprise SOA (ESOA) approach. The services are designed
to help very large global SAP customers as they migrate from older
versions of the vendor's R/3 applications to the newer SOA-focused mySAP
versions, according to Tim Treat, manager of worldwide packaged
applications for enterprise applications services at HP. Such a
migration is highly complex involving not only the upgrading of software,
but also refreshing of servers and storage to support the new
applications. In February 2006, HP announced a similar intensification
of SOA services to support SAP's main applications rival Oracle and
its Fusion middleware. HP's new move will position HP as offering the
same level of SOA services for SAP as the vendor already does for Oracle.
The new HP services will support core elements of SAP's NetWeaver
middleware and will include programs like workforce integration for
NetWeaver Portal and information integration for NetWeaver Business
Intelligence. The services target the different stages of an ESOA
implementation from the initial envisioning of the IT system through
governance, development and deployment. Close to 50 percent of all SAP's
global installations run on HP hardware. HP knows exactly what's
involved since it's going through the same process as other SAP
customers. Treat said HP has the world's fifth largest SAP application
implementation with many of the company's 150,000 employees having
access to the vendor's software. Like many other companies, HP has
amassed multiple versions of R/3 over the years particularly as a
result of acquisitions like that of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) and
later Compaq. Implementing the SOA approach can take anywhere from one
to three years, Treat said.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/29/HNhpsapsoa_1.html
See also the announcement: http://xml.coverpages.org/HP-SOA-SAP.html

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Mozilla Updates Firefox 3.0 Preview
Gregg Keizer, ComputerWorld

Mozilla Corpoation has released the second alpha version of what will
become its Firefox 3.0 Web browser. The release is the latest milestone
in a plan to put the open-source browser in users' hands during the
second half of the year [2007]. Dubbed "Gran Paradiso," the preview is
still geared toward "Web application developers and our testing
community," according to release notes on the Mozilla site. The company
warned general users to steer clear and stick with the 2.0.x and 1.5.x
production versions. Among the changes to the second alpha are
enhancements in the way Web pages render incrementally -- while images
load or dynamic changes are made to a page, for example. Other changes
include improvements in the browser's interaction with Mac OS X widgets
and the addition of full support for ACID2 test compliance. Firefox 3.0,
which is based on the new Gecko 1.9 layout engine, will be the first
Mozilla browser to drop support for Windows 95, 98 and Millennium, as
well as for Mac OS X 10.2 and earlier. Alpha 2 can be downloaded in
Windows, Mac OS X and Linux versions from the Mozilla Web site. [Note:
"Acid2 is a test page for web browsers published by The Web Standards
Project (WaSP). It has been written to help browser vendors make sure
their products correctly support features that web designers would like
to use. Acid2 tests features that web designers have been requesting.
Everything that Acid2 tests is specified in a Web standard, but not all
Web standards are tested. Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any
specification. After careful consideration, we have selected and are
testing the features we consider most important for the future of the
web. Although Acid2 was inspired by Microsoft's announcement of IE7, it
is not targeted at a specific browser. We believe Acid2 will highlight
problems in all current browsers. Acid2 assumes basic support for HTML4,
CSS1, PNG, and Data URLs. It should be noted that Acid2 is rendered in
standards mode. That is, the test page includes a DOCTYPE which signals
that the browser should treat the page according to standards. Vendors
that are reluctant to make changes in how they render legacy documents
can continue their current behavior in what is known as quirks mode."]

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9010866
See also the Acid2 test page: http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/guide/

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XML Parsing Techniques With Perl: Tree Parsing and Event-Driven Parsing
Jim Dixon, IBM developerWorks

This series is a guide to those who need a quick XML-and-Perl solution.
Part 1 looked at XML::Simple, a tool to integrate XML into a Perl
application. In this article, Part 2 of the three-part series, the
author provides an overview of the very complex world of XML parsing.
First it showed how to convert an XML document into a tree of objects
in memory. Initially most programmers find this approach more natural,
and it is indeed more convenient in many ways so long as the data will
fit in memory. Then it introduces SAX and event-based parsing, the
approach you must take if your XML document is very large or is an
unending stream. As it turns out, the tools developed to deal with
these conditions lend themselves to an entirely different style of
programming, one that turns out to be very rich: the SAX pipeline.
Tree parsing:  Most programmers will probably find it comfortable to
view XML as a tree structure. This view of XML was formalized as the
Document Object Model, the DOM, in a process lasting many years; DOM
Level 3 was reached in 2002. The DOM represents an XML document as a
tree of doubly-linked nodes, with the first child at each level linked
up to its parent and across to siblings. A large set of functions is
defined on the tree, with implementations in the major programming
languages. Although you can navigate a DOM tree by following the links,
it is generally more efficient in terms of programmer time to use the
XPath protocol. This is a sublanguage allowing navigation to nodes,
retrieval of sets of nodes, and so forth. The Simple API for XML (SAX),
takes an entirely different approach to parsing, one that initially
has a higher overhead. SAX conceives of a document as a series of
events, and requires that you tell it how to respond to each. The next
article in this series will show how you can use both of these
approaches -- DOM and SAX parsing -- in more complex applications.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks//library/x-xmlperl2.html

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