XML Daily Newslink. Monday, 19 February 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Monday, 19 February 2007
A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org
Edited by Robin Cover

====================================================

This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

====================================================

HEADLINES:

* Lombardi Moving BPM Online: Process Discovery as a Service
* Put to the Test: Lombardi Takes BPM Mainstream
* Standalone XQuery Implementation in .NET?
* Grindstone to the GRDDL
* Enterprise Mashups Meet SOA
* BEA Paper for W3C Workshop on Web of Services for Enterprise Computing
* TAG Paper for W3C Workshop on Web of Services for Enterprise Computing

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Lombardi Moving BPM Online: Process Discovery as a Service
Ephraim Schwartz, InfoWorld

The announcement last week from Lombardi Software that it will add a
SaaS (software as a service) component dubbed Blueprint to its
on-premises BPM suite highlights both the continuing growth of the
hosted model and its limitations. In offering Blueprint, Lombardi
becomes one of the first vendors to offer a SaaS solution for BPM.
However, Blueprint is not Lombardi's entire BPM suite. Rather it is one
component, covering the preliminary process discovery portion of BPM
during which people-to-people collaboration is essential. An end-to-end
SaaS solution for BPM may still be a way off. The hosted solution uses
a shared workspace within the browser that non-technical users can use,
but it also supports the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)
standard for business analysts comfortable working with a standard
industry tool. The underlying data model for the on-premises and SaaS
components are identical so that once the processes that need improvement
are defined the data is sent back and forth to the hosted solution
behind the firewall through a feed similar to RSS. According to Phil
Gilbert, Lombardi CTO, SaaS is the right delivery mechanism to tap the
many different players who only understand their piece of the workflow
puzzle.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/19/HNsaasbpm_1.html
See also BPMN: http://www.bpmn.org/index.htm

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Put to the Test: Lombardi Takes BPM Mainstream
Derek Miers, Intelligent Enterprise

In late 2005, the Object Management Group (OMG) began working on a
Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM) standard designed to help
organizations assess and grow their process management capabilities.
Understanding process maturity helps managers assess their performance
in the right context and chart a course toward achieving larger
corporate goals. Lombardi Software, a pure-play business process
management suite (BPMS) vendor, is taking this issue head on by
embedding BPMM capabilities into its core TeamWorks product, into the
Lombardi for Office (LFO) add-on product and into Blueprint, its just-
announced on-demand modeling tool set. Think of Blueprint as a process
capture tool that blends Wiki-style editing with WebEx collaboration
and a Six Sigma-problem-solving focus. Alternatively, you could just
regard Blueprint as an on-demand Business Process Modeling Notation
(BPMN) standard environment that lets a project team (including modeling
neophytes) collaborate over process development. The model storage
format is based on OMG's new Business Process Description Metamodel
(BPDM) standard, so models can potentially be moved to any other BPDM-
enabled modeling tool or deployment environment. Although BPDM has not
yet been formally released or adopted, Lombardi has been very active
in its development. Look for more vendors to adopt this standard in
the coming months. With LFO and Blueprint, Lombardi looks beyond BPMS
power users and engages ordinary business users that need and want the
benefits of process improvement. The collaborative, on-demand nature
of Blueprint demonstrates a new direction that may help take BPM
mainstream.

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/channels/performance/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197005004

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Standalone XQuery Implementation in .NET?
Staff, Microsoft XML Team's WebLog

XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 are now W3C Recommendations, thanks in part
to the contributions of  several Microsoft employees over the years.
An earlier draft of the XQuery specification is supported in SQL
Server 2005 , and you can send an XQuery to the server using the ADO.NET
that shipped in Visual Studio 2005. These features are becoming widely
used. Now that the XQuery family of specifications is complete, it's
fair to ask what our implementation plans might be, We had been working
on an implementation of XQuery in the .NET Framework that operated over
standalone XmlDocuments several years ago, and showed the work in
progress in the first beta of what became Visual Studio 2005. That was
not shipped for several reasons . The most compelling reason was that
it was obvious in 2004 that the W3C Recommendation would not be complete
before that product release was frozen. Another reason was that this
seemed like it was just XSLT in a different skin, whereas what our
customers really wanted was a more powerful implementation that provided
advanced features such as in-memory indexes and support for mapping
parts of the query to the back-end server, including use of the XML
datatype and XQuery provided by SQL server. This would have been much
more work, and would have required us to go far beyond what the W3C was
standardizing -- so our focus back then was to make sure the back end
server support for XQuery was rock solid. We have had occasional
requests from our user community for a client side implementation of
XQuery that operates over standalone XmlDocuments, but we see no clear
groundswell of demand yet. We very much wish to hear from our user
community about their requirements that could be met with XSLT 2.0 and
XQuery 1.0. We announced last week that we are actively working on an
XSLT 2.0 implementation.

http://blogs.msdn.com/xmlteam/archive/2007/02/08/standalone-xquery-implementation-in-net.aspx

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Grindstone to the GRDDL
Dave Beckett, Journalblog

My Raptor RDF parsing / serialising library has been doing GRDDL
processing of a sort to make RDF triples for several years but it was
only in Raptor 1.4.14 announced 31 January that I finally got round to
managing the recursion through XML Namespace URIs and HTML head profiles,
so that I was covering the majority of the spec. That was my coding over
the Christmas break I took in the UK. In the last few weeks I have been
working on the GRDDL tests, some of which themselves are in beta, and
getting my code through them, or fixing the tests. I'm happy that
finally I've got to the stage where I think either: (a) I pass a test
or (b) the test has the wrong result. I'm currently waiting for the
answer to my last report to the WG and they could still change or add
to the spec but I expect it'll be Last Call very shortly. I'll wait
until their reply before I ship a new version of Raptor with the most
recent changes, which you can read now in the draft release notes if
you want to know more. So apart from diving into Raptor Subversion, you
can kick the tires of the fixes right now with the Raptor parser demo
for GRDDL and you'll need a URI with some GRDDL-compatible markup for
the URI box. [Note: "GRDDL is a mechanism for Gleaning Resource
Descriptions from Dialects of Languages. This GRDDL specification
introduces markup based on existing standards for declaring that an
XML document includes data compatible with the Resource Description
Framework (RDF) and for linking to algorithms (typically represented
in XSLT), for extracting this data from the document. The markup includes
a namespace-qualified attribute for use in general-purpose XML documents
and a profile-qualified link relationship for use in valid XHTML
documents. The GRDDL mechanism also allows an XML namespace document
(or XHTML profile document) to declare that every document associated
with that namespace (or profile) includes gleanable data and for
linking to an algorithm for gleaning the data."]

http://journal.dajobe.org/journal/posts/2007/02/17/grindstone-to-the-grddl/
See also GRDDL: http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Enterprise Mashups Meet SOA
Dave Linthicum, InfoWorld

The line is blurring between the enterprise and the Web. Mashups live
on that porous perimeter, offering the reusability of an SOA plus very
rapid development using prebuilt services outside the firewall. Soon,
we may live in a world where it's difficult to tell where the enterprise
stops and the Web begins. But just having the ability to create mashups
doesn't mean they'll be valuable. You need to properly provision and
manage the services available for mashups and understand their purpose
and place in an SOA. The task is threefold. First, you must prepare
existing infrastructure to support mashups. Second, you need to
understand your requirements. And third, you've got to wrap your head
around the potential value that mashups can and cannot bring. Although
mashups originate with Web 2.0, which epitomizes development on the fly,
mashups in the enterprise require preparation. You need to build and
support an SOA that's "mashable" with services and content, as well as
with APIs that are both local and remote to the enterprise. Among other
things, that means existing enterprise application services must be
able to access Internet-hosted services safely.  Google Maps mashups,
which hook the wildly popular mapping service to some database that
includes street addresses, have become almost cliche. More complex
mashups approach composite applications (those that are made up of many
services), an advanced SOA concept. For instance, you could mash up a
customer database with marketing metrics, then mash up the results even
further with sales forecast processes. You own and maintain some of
the information and services; some are accessible over the Internet. So,
who's providing these services? SaaS (software as a service) players
such as Salesforce.com seem to have the largest number of enterprise-
class services, with service marketplaces such as StrikeIron in the mix,
as well as services from vertical sites such as finance, retail, and
health care. All have provisioned services, data, and content that are
consumable over the Web. Mashup preparation can be divided into six
familiar stages: requirements, design, governance, security, deployment,
and testing. These are core architectural bases you must touch if you
are to arrive safely in the promised land of mashups on top of an SOA.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/19/08FEsaassoa_1.html
See also Mashup Platform Vendors: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/19/08FEsaasoares_1.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------

BEA: Paper for W3C Workshop on Web of Services for Enterprise Computing
David Orchard, BEA Systems White Paper

Much of the Web Services infrastructure is in place within and without
the W3C. Messaging specifications that are final or fairly close to
final: SOAP 1.2, XOP/MTOM, WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging,
WS-Security (and other WS-Security* specifications), WS-Transactions.
Description formats are similarly in advanced stages: WS-Policy and
WSDL 2.0. Discovery efforts in UDDI are finished. As well, WS-BPEL is
well advanced. There is a base level of interoperability between the
specifications defined in the WS-I Profiles, and there are more profiles
emerging for the later specifications. There are other messaging,
description and discovery efforts that are not in the standards process:
WS-MetadataExchange, WS-Eventing, WS-Transfer, WS-Management*. There
are some areas that have made little public progress: intermediary
support, client-side routing, message flow control, A certain faction
of developers doing 'services' is promoting XML using HTTP as a transfer
protocol, sometimes called REST. They do not support using the various
WS- specifications for message transfer. At the same time as the
development of 'Web Services 1.0', Web 2.0 technologies have been
gaining in popularity, such as 'mashups' that perform Web integration.
There are clearly two architectures in play, the WS-* architecture that
promotes many operations (typically on fewer resources) and the REST
architecture that promotes few operations (generic interface) on more
resources. There is a need for more appropriate machine readable
descriptive capabilities for Web based services. The promise of WSDL
2.0 has not materialized and is unlikely to do so. Part of this is
more support and higher productivity for an AJAX and non-Ajax clients
interacting with many different components/services/widgets. This would
foster increased productivity in Web based services, and potentially
provide for integration with the description-centric Web services
community. An observation is that there does not appear to be technology
available for easily integrating Web services with the Web either from
offering SOAP services to Web clients or the converse of SOAP/WSDL
clients consuming REST services.

http://www.w3.org/2007/01/wos-papers/bea

----------------------------------------------------------------------

TAG Paper for W3C Workshop on Web of Services for Enterprise Computing
Noah Mendelsohn (for the W3C TAG), White Paper

Although a few TAG members have direct experience building and
supporting enterprise-grade networking systems, most of us have far
deeper knowledge of the World Wide Web and of the technologies that
have been used to build it. This white paper is intended to set out a
few of the issues as we understand them, and to share some ideas about
architectural tradeoffs. We do not attempt here to suggest what "the
right answers" should be, but rather to offer some ideas that we hope
will promote useful discussion. In keeping with the overall style of
the workshop, we focus mainly on analyses motivated by use cases, and
conclude with some discussion of the implications. Specifically, we
ask the question: should WS and the Web be disjoint systems that share
some technology, or should the two be more tightly integrated? To
explore that question, we present as use cases three variations on the
same theme: providing Web and/or WS-based control and query of an
Internet-connected printer. The first use case discusses a traditional
Web-based control interface; the second explores the characteristics of
a pure WS-based approach; the third presents a printer that supports
both interfaces simultaneously. Ten years ago, it would have been
unusual to find a Web server embedded in a printer. Indeed, if one had
asked a printer manufacturer about including such a capability one might
have gotten a quite puzzled: "We know how to control printers. The Web
is for getting stock quotes and reading news reports. They're different."
Yet today, it's common to find Web servers embedded in printers. Web
Services resources, however, are often not enabled for Web access.
In this note we ask whether those resources too might benefit from
better Web support. Given that much of the WS stack already uses Web
technologies such as URIs and HTTP we also ask a related question:
are those Web technologies being used by WS in a way that maximizes
value? The value of network effects is extraordinary when hundreds of
millions of resources are interconnected on a global scale. There is
also great value in exploiting the nearly ubiquitous deployment of Web
proxies, user agents, Web-enabled databases, and other tools, all of
which depend on appropriate use of Web technologies such as URIs, HTTP
GET, etc. So, we think that integration of Web and WS technologies is
worth at least very careful thought.

http://www.w3.org/2007/01/wos-papers/tag
See also the program listing: http://www.w3.org/2007/01/wos-ec-program.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------

XML Daily Newslink and Cover Pages are sponsored by:

BEA Systems, Inc.         http://www.bea.com
IBM Corporation           http://www.ibm.com
Innodata Isogen           http://www.innodata-isogen.com
SAP AG                    http://www.sap.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc.    http://sun.com

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Newsletter subscribe: xml-dailynews-subscribe@lists.xml.org
Newsletter unsubscribe: xml-dailynews-unsubscribe@lists.xml.org
Newsletter help: xml-dailynews-help@lists.xml.org
Cover Pages: http://xml.coverpages.org/

----------------------------------------------------------------------