XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 21 February 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 21 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
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

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HEADLINES:

* OAXAL: Open Architecture for XML Authoring and Localization
* Final Report: W3C Content Labels
* Cisco Spends $135 Million on XML Firm
* Switch on SAML for PHP With Project Lightbulb
* It's a Saml World, After All
* W3C Renews Internationalization Activity, Launches Architecture Group
* Using Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE for Web Services
* Creating an XForms-based Logo Generator
* Interview with Sanjiva Weerawarana: Debunking REST/WS-* Myths

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OAXAL: Open Architecture for XML Authoring and Localization
Andrzej Zydron, XML.com

XML is now acknowledged as the best format for authoring technical
documentation. Its wide support, extensible nature, separation of form
and content, and ability to publish in a wide variety of output formats
such as PDF, HTML, and RTF make it a natural choice. In addition, the
costs associated with implementing an XML publishing solution have
decreased significantly. Nevertheless, there are some clear DO's and
DON'Ts when authoring in XML, some of which are detailed in 'Coping
with Babel', a paper from the XML 2004 conference. XML, thanks to its
extensible nature and rigorous syntax, has also spawned many standards
that allow the exchange of information between different systems and
organizations, as well as new ways of organizing, transforming, and
reusing existing assets. For publishing and translation, this has
created a new way of using and exploiting existing documentation assets,
known as Open Architecture for XML Authoring and Localization (OAXAL).
OAXAL takes advantage of the arrival of some core XML-related standards:
(1) DITA -- Darwin Information Typing Architecture from OASIS; (2)
xml:tm -- XML-based text memory from LISA OSCAR. DITA is a very well
thought-out way of introducing object-oriented concepts into document
construction. It introduces the concepts of reuse and granularity
into publishing within an XML vocabulary. It is having a big impact
on the document publishing industry. xml:tm is also a pivotal standard
that provides a unified environment within which other localization
standards can be meaningfully integrated, thus providing a complete
environment for OAXAL. OAXAL allows system builders to create an
elegant and integrated environment for document creation and
localization. The OAXAL model provides full process automation, right
up to delivering matched files to the translator. Automation eliminates
the costs associated with project management and manual processes.
Data gets processed faster and more efficiently and without the costs
associated with a traditional localization workflow.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/02/21/oaxal-open-architecture-for-xml-authoring-and-localization.html
See also the related paper (PDF): http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html#ZydronOAXAL-PDF

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Final Report: W3C Content Labels
Phil Archer and Jo Rabin, W3C Incubator Group Report

W3C announced that its Content Label Incubator Group (WCL XG) has
published a final report, "W3C Content Labels." This report defines a
data model for Content Labels through which identified parties can make
assertions about the properties of a resource, or groups of resources.
Specifically the report: (1) defines the requirements for Content
Labels; (2) defines a data model for such labels; (3) describes how
to establish relationships between labels and what they label; (4)
begins to define a normative vocabulary relating to the creation and
certification of labels -- the making of assertions about other labels;
(5) describes the principles behind determining the trustworthiness of
the labels. The report identifies various areas which require further
investigation and debate. The intention is that it forms a major input
into a Working Group which would develop the ideas and create a W3C
Recommendation. Initially, the group was chartered to look for "a way
of making any number of assertions about a resource or group of
resources" where those assertions should be testable in some way
through automated means." It quickly became apparent that the
terminology used in that summation needed to be refined and clarified;
however it was possible to construct a set of use cases that amply
demonstrates the aims in more detail. A set of high level requirements
was derived from the use cases that were then formalized for this
report. Based on group discussion it was possible to reformulate the
output of the Web Content Labels Incubator Activity as defining: "A
way of making any number of assertions, using any number of
vocabularies, about a resource or group of resources. The assertions
are open to automatic authentication based on available data such as
who made the assertions and when." medical content labeling applications
might be concerned with properties of the agencies and processes that
produce Web content (e.g.. companies, people, and their credentials).
Equally, a 'Mobile Web' application might need to determine the
properties of various devices such as their screen dimensions, and
those device types might be labeled with such properties by their
manufacturer or by others. By contrast, a mobile content labeling
application might be more concerned with different kinds of information
resource and their particular (and varying) representations as streams
of bytes. The Incubator Group is now seeking a charter to re-form as
a full Working Group on the W3C Recommendation Track.

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/wcl/XGR-wcl-20070220/
See also the W3C Incubator Activity: http://www.w3.org/2006/02/incubator-pressrelease

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Cisco Spends $135 Million on XML Firm
Marguerite Reardon, CNET News.com

Cisco Systems said Wednesday it will spend $135 million in cash and
options to buy Reactivity, a small company that makes equipment to
help route XML Internet traffic. Reactivity's equipment is designed
to help companies more easily and quickly deploy XML (Extensible
Markup Language), a standard for Web documents. The company, which
is based in Redwood City, Calif., was founded in 1998 and has 56
employees. Cisco said it expects the deal to close in its fiscal
third quarter, which ends April 28. Cisco is the No. 1 provider of
infrastructure equipment to companies large and small. The company's
bread and butter has been the sale of Ethernet switches and IP routers,
which are used to shuttle Internet traffic throughout corporate
networks and across the open Internet. But in recent years, Cisco
has been expanding its product portfolio in several different areas...
Cisco isn't the only company buying up XML appliance start-ups. A
year and a half ago, IBM, a longtime Cisco partner, bought a small
company called DataPower, which also makes appliances to help
companies deploy and manage XML Web services. Computer chipmaker Intel
is also in this business with a company it bought in 2005 called
Servaga. One of the reasons that specialized XML network appliances
have emerged is because of the growing use of XML and XML-based Web
services protocols. These standards are designed to allow for better
interoperability between systems, but they also bring about
performance problems from processing XML documents. Dedicated
appliances can help alleviate those issues.  According to the Cisco
announcement: "Customers and major software providers are evolving
their enterprise software architectures from a client-server paradigm
to a service-oriented architecture. In addition, customers are
deploying a variety of Web 2.0 capabilities that are collectively
transforming the World Wide Web from a collection of relatively
static web sites to a services rich computing platform. XML- and
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)-based web services are becoming
the de facto communications and information exchange standard for this
new model of applications. Reactivity's industry leading XML gateways
enable customers to efficiently deploy, secure, and accelerate XML
and web services. The acquisition demonstrates Cisco's commitment to
the expanding Application Networking Services (ANS) Advanced Technology
segment, which is an important part of Cisco's Service-Oriented
Network Architecture (SONA) strategy and vision. Cisco ANS provides
customers with shared application-aware services to improve the
availability, performance, and security of applications delivered
from the network platform. Reactivity complements and extends the
capability of Cisco's ANS portfolio for these emerging application
architectures."

http://news.com.com/2100-1036_3-6160998.html
See also the announcement: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2007/corp_022107.html?CMP=ILC-001

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Switch on SAML for PHP With Project Lightbulb
Pat Patterson and Marina Sum, Sun Developer Network

Lightbulb, an Open Web Single Sign-On (OpenSSO) subproject, aims to
achieve federated identity for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python,
and Perl) and MARS (MySQL, Apache, Ruby, and the Solaris Operating
System). Currently, Lightbulb offers a service provider (SP) written
in PHP with Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0. This article
elaborates on the SP code and describes how to enable Web applications
that are also written in PHP with SAML 2.0. SAML 2.0 consists of a set
of specifications for communicating information on user authentication,
entitlement, and attributes. With SAML, you can configure SPs to permit
access to resources only when an identity provider (IdP) has
authenticated a user, thus enabling SSO between the IdP and the SPs.
SAML 2.0 was approved by the Organization for the Advancement of
Structured Information Standards (OASIS) in March 2005. Presently,
Lightbulb implements the SP role in SAML 2.0's Web browser SSO profile
through the SAML redirect and POST bindings. To protect user privacy,
SAML 2.0 can specify a pseudonym in the SAML Assertion's NameID element
rather than the user's actual identifier (for example, the user name)
at the IdP. That pseudonym, a string of characters typically randomly
generated by the IdP, is known as a persistent (opaque) identifier --
the user's identifier in the context of the IdP-SP relationship. That
way, neither provider knows the user's identifier at the other end.
Furthermore, because the user has a different persistent identifier
for each IdP-SP pair, SPs cannot correlate user accounts among
themselves. The current, initial Lightbulb SP is structured as a
simple sample PHP application, integrated with SAML's SP library
code. A future article on Lightbulb will explain SAML's circle-of-trust
concept and will describe how Lightbulb's single logout process
terminates user sessions with all the members of a circle of trust.
The Open Web SSO project (OpenSSO) provides core identity services to
simplify the implementation of transparent single sign-on (SSO) as a
security component in a network infrastructure. OpenSSO provides the
foundation for integrating diverse web applications that might typically
operate against a disparate set of identity repositories and are hosted
on a variety of platforms such as web and application servers. [Note:
At present, Lightbulb is experimental, so treat it as sample code only.]

http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/identserver/reference/techart/lightbulb.html
See also the Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/superpat/entry/switching_on_the_lightbulb

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It's a Saml World, After All
Eve Maler, Pushing String Blog

"Nope, that's not a typo. I kept thinking about that silly tune when
I saw the panel assembled for an RSA conference session called 'SAML
2.0 -- Standard-of-Choice in the Public Sector', hosted by Brett
McDowell. The speakers represented identity management initiatives in
the US, Denmark, Finland, and the UK. I thought it would be interesting
to share what I heard... [excerpts] (1) Soren Peter Nielsen,
representing the Denmark State Services Commission - 'Based on these
requirements, picking SAML 2.0 really was a slam-dunk decision. The
fact that the US GSA E-Authentication Initiative chose SAML was one
factor in Denmark's choice.' (2) Tero Pernu, representing the Finnish
Board of Taxes - 'The Finnish case study is a bit more broader than
the Danish one. This one includes also the Liberty Identity Web Service
Framework. SAML2 was attractive partly because of its layered security
model: transport and message security. It also has a strong developer
community, which welcomed Finnish tax board participation. Katso is
the nickname for the nationwide Finnish authentication system.' (3)
Brett McDowell (BMcD)- 'This panel will discuss why governments are
deploying SAML2 for federation, and we'll explore the use of open
standards to meet regulatory requirements. Governments are one example
of an enterprise. SAML2 was the result of convergence of SAML V1.x,
Liberty ID-FF, and Internet2 Shibboleth. The market has been growing
around SAML. One clear driver has been the Liberty Interoperable program,
with about 80 certifications made through it so far. Deployers can
request Liberty Interoperable certification in their RFPs. Over 1
billion identities and devices are Liberty-enabled.'..."

http://www.xmlgrrl.com/blog/archives/2007/02/20/its-a-saml-world-after-all/
See also SAML references: http://xml.coverpages.org/saml.html

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W3C Renews Internationalization Activity, Launches Architecture Group
Staff, W3C Announcement

W3C has announced the renewal of the Internationalization (I18n)
Activity and the launch of a new Internationalization Architecture
Working Group chaired by Francois Yergeau (Invited Expert). The
Internationalization (I18n) Architecture Working Group, part of the
Internationalization Activity, is now chartered to move forward work
on the "Character Model for the World Wide Web" and on "Language Tags
and Locale Identifiers for the World Wide Web." Based on the "Character
Model for the World-Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals", the Character Model
Architectural Specifications provide authors of specifications,
software developers, and content developers with a common reference
on the use of normalization of text and string identity matching, and
the use of resource identifiers building on the Universal Character
Set on the Web. The goal of these specifications is to improve
interoperable text manipulation on the World Wide Web. The Working
Group will describe how document formats, specifications, and
implementations should handle the language tags described by "Tags
for the Identification of Languages" by completing "Language Tags and
Locale Identifiers for the World Wide Web." Also, the charters of the
Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Working Group chaired by Yves
Savourel (Enlaso) and the Internationalization Interest Group chaired
by Martin Duerst (Invited Expert) have been extended.

http://www.w3.org/2006/10/i18n-recharter/arch-charter
See also the W3C news item: http://www.w3.org/News/2007#item25

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Using Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE for Web Services
William Brogden, TechTarget

Microsoft has a long history of providing excellent IDEs (Integrated
Development Environment) for various supported languages. The current
Visual Studio 2005 version supports development in the following
languages: Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++ and Visual J#. It also
supports editing of HTML, CSS and JScript (Microsoft's version of
JavaScript). Naturally the emphasis is on Microsoft's .NET framework --
Microsoft products such as the IIS Web server, SQL Server database, and
the Windows operating system in all its various forms. The Windows
Communication Framework, or WCF, has been under development for years
in a project previously codenamed Indigo. WCF is intended to support
reliable and secure communication using industry standard SOAP and
related XML standards within a single computer or across multiple
networked computers. Interoperability with applications outside the .NET
Framework is ensured by adherence to standards created by the Web Service
Interoperability Organization (WS-I) such as WS-Addressing and
WS-Security. WCF is intended to support distributed applications that
are not tightly coupled, but are dynamic and service-oriented. By
sticking to existing standards such as SOAP, WSDL and schema, there
should be maximum backwards compatibility with existing distributed
applications. The first version of Visual Studio appeared ten years
ago, but it has evolved far beyond that initial version. Starting a new
Web service project using the WCF guidance templates creates skeleton
code for what Visual Studio calls data contracts, fault contracts,
service contracts and service implementation interfaces, plus skeleton
code for business entities and business logic. A data contract describes
exactly the data items that will be exchanged in messages and can be
generated from an existing XML Schema, or from an existing data type
defined in a C# class. For all of these components, the guidance package
provides detailed suggestions for how to proceed by invoking various
wizard dialogs. In a similar way, fault contracts describe exactly how
errors will be mapped to SOAP fault messages. Service contracts
describe exactly the functions that a service will expose and the
service implementation interface defines the functions required.
Expanding the skeleton code and modifying the default settings of
various attributes as provided by the templates is an order of magnitude
time-saver for the programmer over generating the files by hand.

http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid26_gci1244443,00.html

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Creating an XForms-based Logo Generator
Nicholas Chase, IBM developerWorks

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) provides an easy way to declaratively
create an image using XML, and XForms provides an easy way to edit
XML. In this article we put the two together to create an XForms-based
XVG editor for creating SVG images such as logos. Although you might
imagine that the editing of an XForms form and having an SVG image in
the browser window update automatically, it is not that easy. But that
doesn't mean it can't be done. This article shows you how to create an
XForms-based logo generator using SVG. The code in this article has
been tested with Firefox and the Mozilla XForms extension, but the
concepts should apply to any XForms implementation. In this example,
we want a form that enables us to edit the properties of existing
shapes, or to remove those shapes altogether. We also want to be able
to add new shapes, edit those shapes, and save the data to a logo file.
Once you've done that, we want to be able to see the changes right
there on the page.  What you learn in this exercise is that you can
use XForms' ability to insert new elements and copy information into
them in order to add new content. You can also use XForms' traditional
element- and attribute-editing capabilities to alter the properties of
SVG objects. From there, you can save the data to a file and view
changes to the file. In a production environment, you will want to
make several changes. For one thing, you'll want each individual user
to have his or her own logo.XML file, probably based on a unique
username. You might want to expand the users' choice of shapes, or
the properties available for editing. You might also provide a way to
download a non-SVG version of the logo, such as in a PDF or PNG file.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xformslogogen/
See also XML and Forms: http://xml.coverpages.org/xmlForms.html

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Interview with Sanjiva Weerawarana: Debunking REST/WS-* Myths
Stefan Tilkov, InfoQ

Sanjiva Weerawarana founded WSO2 after having spent nearly 8 years in
IBM Research, where he was one of the founders of the Web services
platform. During that time, he co-authored many Web services
specifications including WSDL, BPEL4WS, WS-Addressing, WS-RF and
WS-Eventing. He lead the creation of IBM SOAP4J, which was released
just 2 days after the SOAP 1.1 specification was released and which
later became Apache SOAP. He went on to architect and implement many
other products, including Apache Axis, Apache WSIF, the IBM Web
Services Gateway and IBM BPWS4J, a BPEL4WS implementation, and was a
key driver of IBMs Web services technical strategy. From the interview:
[Do you think the REST vs. WS-* views can be consolidated?] "The real
question is whether resource oriented architectures and service
oriented architecture are one and the same. I assert that they're not:
given a distributed systems problem one can develop solutions using
either approach and the artifacts that result would be radically
different. True REST applications are resource oriented. WS-* is used
to implement service oriented architectures. So its not that one's
wrong and the other is right, but rather that they're different. The
great marketing coup that REST folks are trying to pull off is that
WS-* is complex and REST is simple. That's just nonsense- if you really
try to build the type of systems that people build with WS-* using REST,
then you'd end up just as complex. At the same time, many scenarios do
not need all of WS-* for their interactions. That's where the
intersection lies- new stacks like WSO2 WSAS and Apache Axis2, which
are essentially driven by WSDL 2.0, offer full support for POX style
services and also for HTTP GET. The resulting systems would not
necessarily be RESTful but they have the same simplicity advantages
that REST offers. And the best part is, the way we've designed the
programming model and the infrastructure, one can write a service once
and offer a POX binding, a GET binding, a SOAP/WS-* binding and even
a JSON binding without writing a line of code. To me that's the way
to go forward- take the best of both worlds and mash them together
rather than getting caught up in either religion!

http://www.infoq.com/articles/sanjiva-rest-myths

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