XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 06 March 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 06 March 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:

* Eclipse Delivers for Dynamic Languages and AJAX
* Configure Apache to Send the Right MIME Type for XHTML
* Oracle Proposes Open Source Persistence Project at Eclipse Foundation
* NETCONF Monitoring Schema
* Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web: W3C Incubator Group
* Web Services Context Specification (WS-Context) Version 1.0
* Use XForms to Create a Dynamic Web Search: The Flexibility of XForms
* The Role of Government in ICT Standardization
* OSGi Takes Off at EclipseCon
* I Column Like I CM: Component Content Management
* Microsoft Chastises Google on Copyrights

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Eclipse Delivers for Dynamic Languages and AJAX
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

The Eclipse Foundation has announced three new project milestones that
extend the Eclipse platform to better support dynamic languages and
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).  The three projects include
the Eclipse DLTK (Dynamic Language Toolkit), the Eclipse RAP (Rich AJAX
Platform), and the Eclipse ATF (AJAX Toolkit Framework). These projects
provide innovative new Eclipse-based technology to be utilized by AJAX
developers and developers using dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby
and Tcl, said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse
Foundation.  At the EclipseCon conference the Eclipse Foundation
announced that the Eclipse DLTK extends the Eclipse platform to other
dynamic computer languages, such as Python, Ruby and Tcl. And DLTK
provides the frameworks and components, such as debugging and interactive
console, code indexing and refactoring, to simplify the task of adding
support for dynamically typed languages to Eclipse. The initial release
of DLTK is available and provides support for Tcl. Future releases will
have support for Ruby and Python. The Eclipse RAP project provides a
run-time enabling organizations to build rich AJAX-enabled Internet
applications. RAP extends the existing Eclipse RCP by adding a series
of frameworks that allow developers to quickly create AJAX applications.
Based on Eclipse RCP technologies, this new initiative will let
organizations use a common component model and platform to build both
rich desktop applications and rich browser-based applications. The first
milestone release of RAP is now available. The Eclipse ATF project
provides the tools and frameworks for building an AJAX IDE. ATF makes
it easy for developers to build, debug and deploy their AJAX
applications. It includes a variety of components, including a
JavaScript debugger that supports debugging of local and network files
and tools for inspecting running AJAX applications. Eclipse ATF
supports a number of the more popular AJAX frameworks, including Dojo,
Rico and Zimbra. The latest available download of ATF provides support
for Mac OS X, in addition to existing Windows and Linux support.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2100933,00.asp
See also the announcement: http://www.eclipse.org/org/press-release/20070306eclipseajax.php

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Configure Apache to Send the Right MIME Type for XHTML
Elliotte Rusty Harold, IBM developerWorks

This tip shows you how to configure Apache to tag Extensible Hypertext
Markup Language (XHTML) documents with the media type
'application/xhtml+xml' for browsers that support it, while still
sending text/html to nonconformant browsers such as Microsoft Internet
Explorer; it explains the use of mod_rewrite for browser sniffing.
When a Web server sends a document to a browser, it prefixes the
document with a response header which contains metadata telling the
browser how to interpret the document. One of the most important pieces
of metadata is the Content-Type: this tells the browser how to render
the content. For instance, a browser uses different code to display a
JPEG than it does to display a GIF. Most importantly, many browsers
use different code to display XHTML than they do to display Hypertext
Markup Language (HTML). Web servers are supposed to tag XHTML documents
with the media type application/xhtml+xml. Web browsers that recognize
this media type take this as a signal to work in strict mode rather
than in tag soup mode. This enables more reliable display and is
especially important for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) layouts and
JavaScript programs based on the document's object model. Indeed, in
some cases the same document can display two different ways depending
on whether it's processed in tag soup mode or strict mode. If you go
to the trouble to generate well-formed or even valid XHTML, strict mode
is what you plan for and desire. A browser that does not support XHTML
can still handle a well-formed document in tag soup mode. The results
won't be perfect, but they'll be passable for the small fraction of
users running very old browsers. They'll also be acceptable to the much
larger fraction of users running the standards-nonconformant Internet
Explorer. However, current versions of Internet Explorer (including
versions 6 and 7) do not recognize the 'application/xhtml+xml' media
type. If you send Internet Explorer an 'application/xhtml+xml' document,
it will instead offer to save the file. Therefore, when serving XHTML,
maximum compatibility requires sending 'application/xhtml+xml' to Firefox,
Safari, Opera, and other standards-conformant browsers and 'text/html'
to Internet Explorer. You send the same file in both cases. You just
change the media type that tags it in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol
(HTTP) header. When using the Apache Web server, you can do this in
the server config file or in the .htaccess file in an individual
directory. XHTML is the future of the Web. However, like many other
important technologies, its adoption has been hampered by poor support
in Microsoft browsers. As this article shows, there's no reason to wait
for Microsoft. You can easily serve correct XHTML to non-Microsoft
browsers while still telling Internet Explorer to treat it as tag soup.
Visitors and page authors using modern browsers will get the full
benefit of XHTML, while visitors hobbled by Internet Explorer will
still get most of the content. Setting the Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions (MIME) media type properly isn't the only thing you need to
do to serve XHTML to legacy browsers, but it is a big step in the right
direction.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tipapachexhtml

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Oracle Proposes Open Source Persistence Project at Eclipse Foundation
Staff, Oracle Announcement

At the EclipseCon Conference, Oracle, a newly appointed Eclipse Board
Member and Strategic Developer, announced it will donate its award
winning Java persistence framework, Oracle TopLink, to the open source
community. In addition, Oracle announced the proposal of a new Eclipse
project to deliver a comprehensive persistence platform based on the
contribution of Oracle TopLink, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware,
source code and test cases. With its latest contribution and project
proposal, Oracle continues to demonstrate its commitment to the
developer and open source communities. Oracle TopLink is the industry's
most advanced persistence architecture, offering object-to-relational,
object-to-XML, and Enterprise Information System data access through
all of the major standards, including the Java Persistence API, Java
API for XML Binding, Service Data Objects, and the Java Connector
Architecture. It has consistently provided developers with superior
performance and choice. Built on industry standards, Oracle TopLink
works with any database, any application server, any development
toolset and process and any Java application architecture. In addition
to its code contribution, Oracle proposes to lead a new Eclipse run-time
project to provide a set of persistence services that can be utilized
in Java and OSGi environments. Working closely with the Eclipse
Foundation, Eclipse member companies and other contributors, Oracle
will use the existing code base of Oracle TopLink as the starting point
for this project. Through its participation in the OSGi Enterprise
Expert Group, Oracle will also work with the group members to create
a set of blueprints that define how OSGi applications can access
standardized persistence technologies. Oracle currently leads three
projects at Eclipse: Dali JPA Tools project, JavaServer Faces Tools
projects, and the BPEL project. Oracle is also participating in the
Data Tools Platform (DTP) Enablement sub-project to provide
integration between DTP and the Oracle Database and has contributed
support for deployment of applications to the Oracle Application
Server from the Web Tools Platform (WTP).

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2007_mar/OpenSource-TopLink.html
See also the FAQ document: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/eclipse/pdf/eclipselink-faq.pdf

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NETCONF Monitoring Schema
Sharon Chisholm and Hector Trevino (eds), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Network Configuration (NETCONF) Working Group have
issued an initial Internet Draft for a "NETCONF Monitoring Schema"
specification. NETCONF can be conceptually partitioned into four layers:
Content, Operations, RPC, and Transport Prptocol. This document defines
Netconf content via an XML Schema to be used to monitor the Netconf
protocol. It provides information about Netconf sessions and
subscriptions. XML elements are defined for (1) Managed Object - a
collection of one of more Elements that define an abstract thing of
interest; (2) Subscription - a concept related to the delivery of
notifications (if any to send) involving destination and selection of
notifications, bound to the lifetime of a session; (3) Operation -
refers to NETCONF protocol operations defined in support of NETCONF
notifications. The IETF Netconf Working Group was chartered to produce
a protocol suitable for network configuration. Configuration of networks
of devices has become a critical requirement for operators in today's
highly interoperable networks. Operators from large to small have
developed their own mechanisms or used vendor specific mechanisms to
transfer configuration data to and from a device, and for examining
device state information which may impact the configuration. Each of
these mechanisms may be different in various aspects, such as session
establishment, user authentication, configuration data exchange, and
error responses. The Netconf Protocol Specification defines an
operational model, protocol operations, transaction model, data model
requirements, security requirements, and transport layer requirements.
The Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) defined in RFC 4741
provides mechanisms to install, manipulate, and delete the configuration
of network devices. It uses an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based
data encoding for the configuration data as well as the protocol
messages. The NETCONF protocol operations are realized on top of a
simple Remote Procedure Call (RPC) layer.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-chisholm-netconf-monitoring-00.txt
See also the WG Charter: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/netconf-charter.html

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Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web: W3C Incubator Group
Staff, W3C Announcement

W3C has announced the formation of a new Incubator Group to address
"Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web." The Initiating Members
include: Image, Video and Multimedia Systems Lab (IVML-NTUA); McDonald
Bradley, Inc; MITRE Corporation; National ICT Australia (NICTA) Ltd;
University of Amsterdam; and University of Bristol. Chairs are Kathryn
Laskey (George Mason University) and Ken Laskey (The MITRE Corporation).
The objectives of the URW3-XG are twofold: (1) To identify and describe
situations on the scale of the World Wide Web for which uncertainty
reasoning would significantly increase the potential for extracting
useful information; (2) To identify methodologies that can be applied
to these situations and the fundamentals of a standardized
representation that could serve as the basis for information exchange
necessary for these methodologies to be effectively used. The
deliverable of URW3-XG will consist of a report that describes the work
done by the XG and identifies the elements of uncertainty that need to
be represented to support reasoning under uncertainty for the World
Wide Web. The report will include a set of use cases illustrating
conditions under which uncertainty reasoning is important. It will also
provide an overview of and discuss the applicability to the World Wide
Web of numerous uncertainty reasoning techniques and the information
that needs to be represented for effective uncertainty reasoning to be
possible. Finally, it will include a bibliography of work relevant to
the challenge of developing standardized representations for uncertainty
and exploiting them in Web-based services and applications. As work
with semantics and services grows more ambitious, there is increasing
appreciation of the need for principled approaches to representing and
reasoning under uncertainty. In this Charter, the term "uncertainty"
is intended to encompass a variety of forms of incomplete knowledge,
including incompleteness, inconclusiveness, vagueness, ambiguity, and
others. The term "uncertainty reasoning" is meant to denote the full
range of methods designed for representing and reasoning with knowledge
when Boolean truth values are unknown, unknowable, or inapplicable.
Commonly applied approaches to uncertainty reasoning include probability
theory, Dempster-Shafer theory, fuzzy logic, and numerous other
methodologies.

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/urw3/charter
See also the W3C Incubator Activity: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/

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Web Services Context Specification (WS-Context) Version 1.0
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS announced that the Web Services Composite Application Framework
(WS-CAF) Technical Committee has submitted a "Web Services Context
Specification (WS-Context) Version 1.0" document as an approved
Committee Specification, to be considered as an OASIS Standard. The
TC was chartered in September 2003 to "define a generic and open
framework for applications that contain multiple services used in
combination (composite applications)... [where] multiple web services
combined in composite applications require interoperable mechanisms
to set the boundaries of an activity (such as start/end, or
success/failure), to create, access and manage context information,
and to inform participants of changes to an activity. Composite
applications might also need to work with a range of transaction models,
including simple activity scoping, single and two phase commit ACID
transactions, and recoverable long running activities."  From the
WS-Context Version 1.0 specification Abstract: "Web services exchange
XML documents with structured payloads. The processing semantics of
an execution endpoint may be influenced by additional information that
is defined at layers below the application protocol. When multiple Web
services are used in combination, the ability to structure execution
related data called context becomes important. This information is
typically communicated via SOAP Headers. WS-Context provides a
definition, a structuring mechanism, and service definitions for
organizing and sharing context across multiple execution endpoints.
The ability to compose arbitrary units of work is a requirement in a
variety of aspects of distributed applications such as workflow and
business-to-business interactions. By composing work, we mean that it
is possible for participants in an activity to be able to determine
unambiguously whether or not they are participating in the same
activity. An activity is the execution of multiple Web services
composed using some mechanism external to this specification, such as
an orchestration or choreography. A common mechanism is needed to
capture and manage contextual execution environment data shared,
typically persistently, across execution instances."

http://docs.oasis-open.org/ws-caf/ws-context/v1.0/CS01/wsctx.html
See also the announcement: http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/200703/msg00004.html

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Use XForms to Create a Dynamic Web Search: The Flexibility of XForms
Stony Yakovac, IBM developerWorks

This article demonstrates the creation of an interface flexible enough
to view the results of multiple XML-based APIs by implementing a
search engine client in which the user selects the engine the data
comes from and automatically receives the appropriate entry fields and
data. In addition, the form loads the data "in the background," so to
speak, displaying the results on the page without requiring a full
reload. In this case, the APIs involved are those of search engines
Yahoo! and Teoma, but the concepts covered in this article apply to any
situation in which you have an API that returns XML. Both search engines
have a REST-based interface, which means you feed them a URL with all
of your parameters and they give you back XML with the results. XForms
implements dynamic changes to the content without re-submitting the page
from the server by linking the XForms visual presentation to an XML data
structure. When the XML data structure is changed, the visual
presentation is re-calculated and changes without having to reload the
page. There are many methods of changing the XML data behind the
presentation. You can take these concepts and use them for your own
XForms-based applications, creating interfaces that adapt to user
choices and the available data.

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

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The Role of Government in ICT Standardization
Andrew Updegrove, Consortium Standards Bulletin

Governments interact with standards in many ways: as developers, when
they draft regulations; as adopters, when they reference private
sector standards in laws and regulations; as influencers, when they
exercise their vast procurement powers in the marketplace, and when
they send representatives to participate in private sector standard
setting organizations; and as end-users, when they utilize standards-
based products. The role that a given government decides to play in
relation to standards varies, depending upon the subject matter of the
standard, and also among governments, and over time. To date,
governments have not as often acted as developers or adopters in the
area of information and communications technologies (ICT) as they have
in traditional areas of interest, such as public health and safety.
However, with the redeployment of a vast range of essential services
(including government services) over the Internet, the digitization of
public records, and the increased use of information technology in the
work place, it is incumbent upon governments to reevaluate their
relationship to ICT standards, and decide what roles they wish to play
in ensuring that standards development and uptake best serves the
public interest. In this article, I seek to facilitate that process,
by reviewing the various roles that government can play, using
accessibility standards (broadly construed) as an example.

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/bulletins/feb07.php#feature

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OSGi Takes Off at EclipseCon
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

These are big times for the technology known as the Open Services
Gateway Initiative framework, as the Eclipse Foundation has adopted it
and several other large enterprise vendors and users have followed suit.
The OSGi Service Platform provides technology that allows applications
to be constructed from small, reusable and collaborative components.
Application areas for OSGi range from use as a service platform on
embedded devices to plug-in mechanisms for larger programs. The initial
goal of OSGi was the embedded market, but it has evolved from there.
The Eclipse plug-in model is based on OSGi. And OSGi will be heavily
represented at EclipseCon this year, as the OSGi Developer Conference
2007 is taking place concurrent with EclipseCon.  "OSGi is mature,
it's been around since 1999 in the embedded world, and is widely
adopted," said Richard Nicholson, CEO of Paremus, a London-based maker
of software for SOAs (service-oriented architectures). "In the last 18
months there has been significant interest, support and commitment to
OSGi in the enterprise software world with BEA (SOA360), IBM (WebSphere,
Lotus), Oracle (Fusion), Red Hat (JBoss) and Spring (Interface21) all
using or committing to using it." For Paremus, OSGi is one of the key
standard initiatives the company's products use, the other being SCA --
Service Component Architecture). Nicholson said: "OSGi provides us with
a lightweight, dynamic, component life cycle allowing us to provide
true pluggable vendor-independent component or service reuse, and to
deliver on the next-generation application server SOA promise" The
Paremus OSGi-based solution, Infiniflow, features individual services
that are defined as OSGi bundles. Paremus, BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle
and Siemens are all talking about OSGi at the show. Moreover, Paremus
will present a talk on Newton, its open-source project based on OSGi.
BEA's mSA (microService Architecture) Backplane is an OSGi-based
infrastructure that consists of about 100 different OSGi bundles...
The U.S. Army, meanwhile, is using OSGi as the run-time on which its
Cyrano software for helping to find weapons of mass destruction is
based. And Adobe Systems has used OSGi as the underlying technology
in its Version Cue embedded client/server tool set.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2100866,00.asp
See also the Paremus announcement: http://www.paremus.com/news/pr/pr07-027-paremus-transforms.pdf

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I Column Like I CM: Component Content Management
Bob Doyle, EContent Magazine

There has been a buzz lately on the mailing lists of the content
management community about "Component Content Management." The
discussion was provoked by a 2006 issue of the Forrester Wave on
Content-Centric Applications. During the discussion, information
management expert JoAnn Hackos commented that many content management
professionals are interested in topic-based authoring using DITA XML,
which is not provided in a robust way by the major ECM companies that
Forrester analyzed. Ann Rockley, president of the Rockley Group,
pointed to a Content Management Technology white paper by Bill
Trippe of the Gilbane Group called "Component Content Management in
Practice."  One important area, according to Trippe, is the need for
some organizations to manage large volumes of content that is used
to support complex products before and after the products are sold.
Examples include auto and truck manufacturers, airlines, and
airplane manufacturers. For some, "component management" has become
synonymous with "single-source" publishing. One industry leader is
AuthorIT, which used "component content management" as their slogan
on marketing materials for some time. What's really new in all this
is the DITA standard. If you go to the AuthorIT site today, you will
see they have embraced DITA as one approach to their reusable
components. DITA has standardized the idea of components into four
major elements, topics, concepts, tasks, and references. These
elements can be arranged in a DITA map, with more than one map
corresponding to different output channels. As AuthorIT says, "You
can combine the same topics in different ways. For example, the
sequence of topics in a tutorial will probably be different than in
a reference manual about the same product or service." Another list-
poster noted that not all content is suitable for "componentization."
The best software and standards technology may simply not apply, for
example to the content in magazine column like this one. The right
content for single-source publishing can be broken up into small
"chunks" that appear in many places. This is perfect for reducing
the costs of translation and localization. If similar chunks can be
identified, then rewritten to be identical everywhere, they need be
translated just once, with enormous cost and time savings.

http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=19433
See also the OASIS DITA Focus Area: http://dita.xml.org

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Microsoft Chastises Google on Copyrights
Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com

Google's narrow view of the protections that copyright law offers
creators has famously made enemies of book publishers, news
organizations and professional photographers over the last few years.
Now Microsoft, which is increasingly competing with Google in business
software and other areas, is piling on its rival as well. Thomas Rubin,
Microsoft's associate general counsel, told an audience of book
publishers on Tuesday that Google "systematically violates copyright"
law. Rubin singled out Google Book Search and YouTube for specific
criticism, saying the services take a "cavalier approach to copyright."
The audience was an unusually receptive one: the Association of
American Publishers, which filed a lawsuit against Google in October
2005 claiming that the search giant violated copyright law by scanning
and distributing books protected under copyright law. A trial will not
take place before next year. Google's very business model invites
clashes over copyright, of course. As the company becomes more deeply
interested in books and video, and expands its search domain beyond
Web pages, it has found itself increasingly at odds with established
content industries. For its part, Google denies any wrongdoing. The
company circulated a statement on Tuesday from David Drummond, its
chief legal officer, that said: "The goal of search engines, and of
products like Google Book Search and YouTube, is to help users find
information from content producers of every size. We do this by
complying with international copyright laws, and the result has been
more exposure and in many cases more revenue for authors, publishers
and producers of content." This week's potshots at Google over
copyright invites comparisons to Microsoft's criticism of free
software six years ago, which led company co-founder Bill Gates to
characterize the GPL (the GNU General Public License) as having a
"Pac-Man-like nature" that consumes other software. Other Microsoft
efforts called GPL-released software "viral," and the so-called
Halloween documents warned that Linux poses a serious threat to
Windows' hegemony.

http://news.com.com/2100-1030_3-6164918.html

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