XML Daily Newslink. Monday, 12 February 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Monday, 12 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
SAP AG  http://www.sap.com

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HEADLINES:

* Novell, Microsoft Provide Virtualization Roadmap
* Web Services Specifications and SOA Interoperability
* Saxon 8.9: Translate XQuery Queries Directly into Java Source Code
* The Mobile Web: Tim Berners-Lee Keynotes 3GSM World Congress
* Zend Touts PHP Application Server in Three Editions
* Building SOA Composite Business Services: The REST Architectural Style
* An Introduction to Hibernate 3 Annotations

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Novell, Microsoft Provide Virtualization Roadmap
Elizabeth Montalbano, InfoWorld

Microsoft and Novell will enable virtualization for each other's server
operating systems as part of the companies' ongoing alliance to make
Windows and Linux more interoperable. Virtualization is just one of
four key areas on which the companies said Monday they will focus their
collaborative efforts this year. The other areas are Web services-based
network management, directory interoperability, and document format
interoperability. In the Web services-based management area, Microsoft
and Novell said that they will both incorporate WS-Management in their
products to enable OS management through Web services. Novell ZENworks
Orchestrator and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 will
both support WS-Management this year. WS-Management is a specification
of a Web services-based protocol for the management of servers, devices,
and applications. Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and other companies published
the spec in March 2005, and it was ratified by the Distributed Management
Task Force for adoption as a preliminary standard in August 2006. Novell
also is working to develop an open-source implementation of WS-Management,
the company said. Microsoft and Novell already have introduced
technologies to make communication between the global standard file
format for office documents, ODF (Open Document Format for XML), and
the default file format in Microsoft Office 2007, Open XML, easier. On
February 2, 2007, Microsoft announced the availability of the Open
XML/ODF Translator for Office 2007, Office 2003, and Office XP. Later
this month, Novell will release an Open XML/ODF Translator for the
Novell edition of the OpenOffice.org open-source productivity suites.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/12/HNnovellmsvirtualization_1.html
See also the announcement: http://www.novell.com/news/press/item.jsp?id=1284

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Web Services Specifications and SOA Interoperability
Sanjay Narang, Enterprise OpenSource

Over the last few years, the basic Web Services standards like XML,
WSDL, and SOAP have matured a lot and WS-I has released a Basic Profile
that contains implementation guidelines for basic Web Services
standards. Today, most vendors provide products that comply with the
Basic Profile and support the standards included in the profile. With
the wide adoption of the Basic Profile, software vendors have been
able to make their products interoperable to a great extent. As the
Web Services industry evolves, it embraces new specifications like
WS-Security, WS-ReliableMessaging (WS-RM), and WS-AtomicTransactions
(WS-AT) to provide advanced functionalities such as security,
reliability, and transactions that are not provided by the basic
specifications. These specifications are generally referred to as the
WS-* (pronounced WS-Star) specifications. As they are relatively new
and have not been so widely agreed on by the industry, achieving
interoperability between Web Services that use WS-* specifications is
much more difficult and the WS-* specifications may not even be
supported in many products. This article provides a set of guidelines
and best practices that you can follow to accomplish interoperability
when developing web services that make use of the WS-* specifications
across products provided by different vendors. It also provides insight
into the Web Services specifications situation that contains a large
number of WS-* specifications that are being developed by different
groups. Interoperability is generally accomplished by developing your
Web Services using the well-established guidelines for implementing
Web Services and by following industry standards such as XML, WSDL,
SOAP, and UDDI. However, just following Web Services standards and
guidelines during the development phase of a project isn't sufficient
to achieve interoperability.

http://opensource.sys-con.com/read/314083.htm

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Saxon 8.9: Translate XQuery Queries Directly into Java Source Code
Staff, Saxonica Announcement

Developers at Saxonica have announced the release of Saxon Version 8.9.
"The most exciting feature of this release is that XQuery queries can
now be translated directly into Java source code, reducing execution
time by anything from 25% to 80%. This facility is available exclusively
in Saxon-SA. The release is the first since the W3C specifications for
XQuery 1.0, XSLT 2.0, and XPath 1.0 reached Recommendation status, and
this is marked by an emphasis in this Saxon release on conformance.
Saxon is the only product to have achieved 100% pass rates against the
W3C test suites for XSLT and XQuery, and the new release also brings
the level of XML Schema conformance close to 100% as measured by the
recently issued W3C test suite.  The technology is available in two
versions: the basic edition Saxon-B, available as an open source product
from SourceForge, and the schema-aware edition Saxon-SA available on a
commercial license from this site. XSLT and/or XQuery: The two languages
have a high level of functional overlap, but each language has unique
strengths. XSLT 2.0 is better than XQuery 1.0 at handling the rendition
of narrative (document-oriented) XML (for example it offers facilities
such as format-number() and format-date()), while XQuery makes it easier
to perform some of the manipulations needed when handling more
rigidly-structured data. Saxon is unique in allowing the two languages
to be mixed in a single application.

http://saxonica.com/index.html

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Tim Berners-Lee Keynotes 3GSM World Congress
W3C Staff, Keynote Address

Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the Web, opened the 3GSM
World Congress on Monday 12-February-2007 in Barcelona, Spain with a
keynote address at the Mobile Innovation Forum. Berners-Lee spoke on
the role of innovation and openness in the Web's success, and how the
W3C Mobile Web Initiative brings mobile telephony into convergence with
the Web and aids in bridging the digital divide. Excerpt: "The Web
worked because of a number of technical and social reasons. It worked
because there was no central bottleneck for traffic, no central link
database to be kept consistent, no central place to go and register a
new page or a new Web site. It worked because it was valuable, in a
novel way. The value added by the web is the unexpected re-use of
information. People learned that if they went to the trouble of putting
something on the Web for some reason, that others would benefit later
in ways they never anticipated... Web 2.0 community web sites, eBay,
and Flickr, in turn, are possible because the Web standards, in turn,
were widely implemented in an interoperable way, before those
innovations. The same for the wikis, like Wikipedia, and blogs, and so
on. The Web is a huge platform for innovation because of those standards.
Any new genre of communication, any new social networking idea,
immediately can gain the value of unexpected re-use by people across
the world. There is a very important difference in attitude between a
foundation technology and -- well -- let's call it a ceiling technology.
A foundation technology is designed to enable innovation, to be the
base which will support other even more powerful things to come. A
ceiling technology is not. It is designed to provide a value, and for
its provider to cash in and cash out. Proprietary music download systems
are ceiling technologies to the extent that the technologists design
to be also being the only store in town, rather than creating an open
market. Though putting a lid on further innovation, they are still
providing a service, and making sure they profit from it. Ceiling
technologies are the end of the road for innovation..."

http://www.w3.org/2007/Talks/0222-3gsm-tbl/text.html
See also the W3C Mobile Web Initiative: http://www.w3.org/Mobile/

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Zend Touts PHP Application Server in Three Editions
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Eyeing organizations that run business-critical Web applications on
the PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) platform, Zend Technologies will now
offers its Zend Platform 3.0 PHP application server. Zend Platform
bolsters deployments of commercial applications on PHP, Mark de Visser,
Zend chief marketing officer, said. New in this version is its
availability in three different editions. Versions are offered for
smaller organizations, for integrating with Java, and for enterprise-
level users. PHP has gotten the nod over Java in some installations
because it offers developer productivity and is suitable for SOA. The
three specific editions of Zend Platform include: (1) The PS release,
which loosely stands for performance server. Geared toward SMBs, it
offers performance improvements and management functions. Capabilities
include PHP intelligence to monitor business applications, and code
acceleration and dynamic content caching to boost performance. Other
features include output compression to reduce bandwidth for better
responsiveness, and simplified configuration management. (2) IS, for
integration server, is geared to organizations with application and
infrastructure needs. Integration is provided with Java and SNMP
infrastructure. Reporting capabilities also are included. A Java
bridge interacts with Java objects or J2EE services. Also highlighted
is integration with Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools
for reporting. (3) ES, for enterprise server, for large organizations
that need scalability and reliability. Session-clustering and high
availability fail-over are featured. Job queues offer off-line
processing for improved interactive responsiveness.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/12/HNzendplatform_1.html
See also the announcement: http://www.zend.com/company/zend_news/announcements/2007/02/zend_technologies_announces_zend_platform_3_0

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Building SOA Composite Business Services: The REST Architectural Style
I. Poddar, Z. Gan, Yue Lin Liu; IBM developerWorks

This article is the third in a series about developing composite
applications to enable business services. The article focuses on the
Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style. By using a
facade component as a REST-style interface, existing SOAP-style Web
services can support customizable URLs, multiple resource format
representations, browser response caching, streaming of large
attachments, and use of HTTP methods to manipulate the resource. The
Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style offers a
low-barrier entry point for consuming Web services. The external
interface of a typical REST-style application consists of a large number
of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) addressable resources and a few
operations, such as Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD). The
advantage of this architectural style is its simplicity. This article
presents an example of a business service for a bank that publishes
mortgage rates to an aggregator Web site like Bankrate. Aggregator Web
sites typically gather information from a number of different providers
and aggregate them in a client-side mashup. This is also referred to
as composition on the glass and can be considered a composite
application. To enable easy construction of such mashups, service
providers need to expose a simplified interface. The REST architectural
style is a perfect fit for this requirement. A REST-style Web service
facade provides certain desirable functions, such as multiple resource
format representations, support for browser caching of responses, and
support for other HTTP methods such as PUT, TRACE, and DELETE. The RAS
pattern asset provided in this article captures the best practices for
developing a REST-style Web service facade.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-composite3/index.html

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An Introduction to Hibernate 3 Annotations
John Ferguson Smart, O'Reilly ONJava.com

Over the years, Hibernate has become close to the defacto standard in
the world of Java database persistence. It is powerful, flexible, and
boasts excellent performance. In this article, we look at how Java 5
annotations can be used to simplify your Hibernate code and make coding
your persistence layer even easier. Traditionally, Hibernate relies on
external XML files for its configuration: database mappings are defined
in a set of XML mapping files and loaded at startup time. There are
many ways to create these mappings, either automatically, from an
existing database schema or Java class model, or by hand. In any case,
you can end up with a considerable number of Hibernate mapping files.
Alternatively, you can use tools to generate the mapping files from
javadoc-style annotations, though this adds an extra step in your build
process. In recent versions of Hibernate, a new, more elegant approach
has emerged, based on Java 5 annotations. Using the new Hibernate
Annotations library, you can dispense once and for all with your old
mapping files--everything is defined as, you guessed it -- annotations
directly embedded in your Java classes. It turns out that annotations
provide a powerful and flexible way of declaring persistence mappings.
They are also well supported in recent Java IDEs, with automatic code
completion and syntax highlighting. Hibernate annotations also support
the new EJB 3 persistence specifications. These specifications aim at
providing a standardized Java persistence mechanism. While Hibernate 3
also provides a few extensions, you can quite easily stick to the
standards and code your Hibernate persistence layer using the EJB 3
programming model. By eliminating the need for XML mapping files, using
Hibernate annotations allows you to simplify your application
maintenance, with the additional advantage of giving you a gentle
introduction into the world of EJB 3.

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2007/02/08/an-introduction-to-hibernate-3-annotations.html

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