XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 07 March 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 07 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:

* Architectural Vision for HTML/XHTML2/Forms Chartering
* W3C Relaunches HTML Activity
* Oracle's Kurian on the Next Application Platform
* Enterprise SOA the Apache Way
* Liberty Alliance Offers Guide for Identity Roll-Out
* PHP5's XML Parsing Techniques for Large or Complex XML Documents
* Swift for Grid Workflow Management
* The Tools of the Master Forecaster

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Architectural Vision for HTML/XHTML2/Forms Chartering
Dan Connolly, Chris Lilley, Tim Berners-Lee; W3C Vision Document

W3C's discussion around the re-chartering of the HTML-related work was
extensive. In the interest of providing a convenient summary, this
document discusses the overall architectural vision behind the
chartering of these groups,and how they fit into the wider pattern of
the Interaction Domain and the overall Web Architecture. W3C has in
general assumed that XML is the correct way forward and that
implementations will fall into line as necessary over time. For the
mobile market, and for non-HTML client technologies like SMIL, SVG,
MathML, Timed-Text and so forth, this has indeed happened. For the
desktop browser market, however, tag soup markup has persisted much
longer than we would have expected or hoped. There are several ways to
approach this situation, given that pretending the situation does not
exist is not acceptable: (1) Try to force users and implementers to
greater adoption of the existing XHTML 1.x (2) Create a new language,
with a different media type, which is more extensible, more accessible,
has richer semantics, and so forth; older user agents which do not
understand this format will not request it, and will reject it. (3)
Create independent but related languages for different audiences. This
has a clear and obvious drawback relative to a single language, and
yet can be considered especially if XML forms a common parsing model.
It would have been possible (and there were some calls for this) for
the primarily desktop oriented, consumer oriented language to have
only a tag-soup serialization. However, that would certainly have a
negative and divisive effect on the Web architecture. Gratuitous
incompatibilities with XML should be strenuously avoided. Instead,
the charter calls for two equivalent serializations to be developed
by the HTML WG, corresponding to a single DOM (or infoset, though tag
soup cannot be considered to have an infoset currently, while it can
have a DOM). This ensures that decisions are not made which would
preclude an XML serialization. It allows the two serializations to be
inter-converted automatically. Having new language features, there is
an incentive for content authors to use it; and having client-side
implementations means that there is the possibility to really use it.
Of these, W3C has chosen the third approach. If this new HTML-family
format is widely used, and if it can be reliably converted to XML if
it is not already serialized in that form (reliably meaning not only
that formatting is the same but the structure is the same, and the
semantics are not altered) then XML-based workflows can create and
consume this content. Meanwhile, enterprise-strength needs are met
by XHTML2, which includes XForms. The two formats are differentiated
by deployment strategy and expected field of use.

http://www.w3.org/2007/03/vision

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W3C Relaunches HTML Activity: Developers and Browser Vendors Shape
HTML Future
Staff, W3C Announcement

W3C has announced a new Charter for the HTML Working Group, extending
through 2010.  The group will maintain and produce incremental revisions
to the HTML specification, which includes the series of specifications
previously published as XHTML version 1. Both XML and 'classic HTML'
syntaxes will be produced. The Working Group will define conformance
and parsing requirements for 'classic HTML', taking into account legacy
implementations; the Group will not assume that an SGML parser is used
for 'classic HTML'. New publications and milestones include: (1) A
language evolved from HTML4 for describing the semantics of documents
and applications on the World Wide Web; this will be a complete
specification, not a delta specification; (2) An extensible, serialized
form of such a language, using XML; (3) A serialized form of such a
language using a defined, non-XML syntax compatible with the 'classic
HTML' parsers of existing Web browsers; (4) Document Object Model (DOM)
interfaces providing APIs for such a language; (5) Forms and common UI
widgets such as progress bars, datagrids, menus, and other controls;
(6) APIs for the manipulation of linked media, editing APIs and user-
driven WYSIWYG editing features. The HTML WG is encouraged to provide
a mechanism to permit independently developed vocabularies such as
Internationalization Tag Set (ITS), Ruby, and RDFa to be mixed into
HTML documents. Whether this occurs through the extensibility mechanism
of XML, whether it is also allowed in the classic HTML serialization,
and whether it uses the DTD and Schema modularization techniques, is
for the HTML WG to determine.  The Group will create a comprehensive
test suite for the HTML specification. The Group will ensure that
validation tools are available, possibly from third parties, for the
HTML specification. Validation does not mean DTD validation; validation
using schemas (such as W3C XML Schema, RelaxNG, Schematron) and
validation which is tolerant of extensions in other namespaces (for
example using ISO DSDL/NVDL) is encouraged, as well as automated
checking of items from the specification prose. The Group will monitor,
track, and encourage implementation of HTML, both during Candidate
Recommendation and afterwards, to encourage adoption. In addition to
the new HTML and XHTML 2 Working Groups, W3C is also pleased to
recharter the Hypertext Coordination Group and charter the Forms
Working Group. The Forms Working Group will continue work on the XForms
architecture, which has seen significant adoption in a variety of
platforms.

http://www.w3.org/2007/03/HTML-WG-charter.html
See also the announcement: http://www.w3.org/2007/03/html-pressrelease

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Oracle's Kurian on the Next Application Platform
Colleen Frye, TheServerSide.com

Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of development for Oracle
middleware platform products, is delivering a keynote at the Java
Symposium on the next application platform. In this interview he talks
about some of the key elements of that platform, including POJO-based
development, orchestration, integration with open source frameworks
like Spring and 'a la carte' Java EE 5 compliance. Kurian: "One of the
primary goals of the EJB 3.0 specification, which includes JPA, was
simplification. One of the biggest and most striking simplifications
in EJB 3.0 is the use of Plain Old Java Objects, or POJOs, instead of
container-generated components. This allows Java developers to build
EJB 3.0 applications in their favorite Java IDE and deploy to a Java
EE 5 application server, without any additional compilation or
preprocessing. The new JPA specification embraces the POJO approach
that has been the preferred one in object-relational mapping products
like Oracle TopLink. It incorporates the best of commercial and open
source object-relational mapping frameworks while embracing the EJB
3.0 approach of intelligent defaults to reduce the amount of work a
developer needs to do to access relational databases from Java.  The
orchestration layer improves on the current generation of application
platforms in key areas of performance, security, and management, and
it's based on the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service
Data Objects (SDO) specifications we co-developed with other industry
players. It uses a normalized messaging format between application
service components, bypassing the marshalling and unmarshalling of
data and letting us optimize for in-memory communication where
possible, all great performance improvements. It also enables a
consistent security model for authentication and encryption of data
regardless of what service protocols are used. Another important
aspect of SCA is the standards-based approach for consolidating all
of the metadata and deployment descriptors associated with the various
integration components of a composite application such as an ESB,
business process engine, etc. This vastly simplifies management
activities such as project versioning, dependency analysis, and
end-to-end monitoring of composite applications. We expect this will
drive a natural consolidation and rationalization of design-time tools.

http://go.techtarget.com/r/1089666/6044145

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Enterprise SOA the Apache Way
Kyle Gabhart, XML.com

Apache.org has been buzzing with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
and Web Services activity for the last several years. If you browse to
the Apache Web Services Project, you'll find a list of more than twenty
(20) SOA and Web Services projects with another handful currently
housed in the Apache incubator. Within this broad range of frameworks
and tools, a few enterprise SOA technology stacks have emerged. In this
article, we explore one of the Apache SOA stacks, Synapse + Axis2 +
Tomcat.  Synapse is a service mediation framework capable of filtering,
routing, and transforming messages based on a flexible XML configuration.
Axis2 is a second-generation service engine that hosts SOAP 1.1/1.2
and REST services, as well as provides support for a host of other WS-*
standards. Tomcat is the standard Java enterprise web server.
Service-Oriented Architecture promises agility and alignment of
business and technical objectives. The combination of three Apache
projects -- Axis2, Synapse, and Tomcat -- results in a pretty compelling
Apache SOA stack. Within the larger context of this service-oriented
defect tracking system, we focus on the specific use case of collecting
defect data from the customer feedback system and defining some simple
rules for escalating certain "high-priority" messages. In traditional
software development, business logic changes require code updates,
followed by compilation and a complete testing cycle. SOA offers agility
by allowing businesses to configure services as needed to meet changing
business requirements. The Synapse mediation framework delivers on SOA's
promise of agility by defining a robust configuration capability backed
by the Synapse Configuration Language, allowing developers to configure
message processing via one or more mediators.  In our use case, we
explore how this SOA stack would enable a business to configure message
routing and escalation business rules to prioritize customer feedback
originating from key accounts. It is easy to see how these rules could
be reconfigured and even expanded to adapt to changing business goals.
Changes in business strategy might easily lead to a change in how
customer feedback is processed and incorporated into bug fixes, R&D,
and even Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This same agility and
flexibility can then be realized throughout the enterprise as more and
more of the business's Information Systems technology is assimilated
into an overarching service-oriented enterprise.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/03/07/enterprise-soa-apache-way.html
See also Apache Synapse: http://ws.apache.org/synapse/

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Liberty Alliance Offers Guide for Identity Roll-Out
Jeremy Kirk, InfoWorld

The Liberty Alliance Project has published a document outlining the
legal issues enterprises should consider when networking their Web
applications and identity systems with those of other businesses. The
primer on creating circles of trust raises awareness around issues
such as privacy, technical terminology, indemnification and dispute
resolution. From the Liberty document, "Liberty Alliance Contractual
Framework Outline for Circles of Trust": "This document provides
guidance on suggested business structures and terminology for a Liberty
enabled technology deployment necessary to create a legally binding
Circle of Trust (CoT). Its purpose is to facilitate a Liberty enabled
deployment of identity management specifications and technology by
assisting stakeholders and their legal and executive management teams
in the identification of the legal structure best suited for their
deployment... This document describes the rationale for using a
contractual framework for the Circle of Trust, offers practical
guidance for developing those contractual frameworks, discusses
considerations that should be taken into account in selecting and
structuring the contractual framework, and describes other Liberty
guidance documents that may be useful as references or starting points
for terminology and certain other aspects of the contractual framework.
Liberty has developed and continues to develop identity federation
based specifications, guidelines and educational materials to help
businesses, governments, and individuals establish and operate
solutions for identity federated and identity-based web services
applications. Liberty anticipates that participants to a Liberty
enabled deployment will enter into contractual relationship(s) that
delineate their rights, obligations, remedies, and allocation of risk
with respect to the deployment. This document provides guidance on
addressing contractual relationship structures that will likely be
part of every Liberty enabled deployment, and provides practical
outlines and checklists for developing those contractual relationships."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/07/HNlibertyidentityrollout_1.html
See also the text: http://www.projectliberty.org/liberty/content/download/2962/19808/file/Liberty%20Legal%20Frameworks.pdf

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PHP5's XML Parsing Techniques for Large or Complex XML Documents
Cliff Morgan, IBM developerWorks

This second article in a three-part series discusses XML parsing
techniques of PHP5, focusing on parsing large or complex XML documents.
PHP5 offers an improved variety of XML parsing techniques. James Clark's
Expat SAX parser, now based on libxml2, is no longer the only fully
functional game in town. Parsing with the DOM, fully compliant with the
W3C standard, is a familiar option. Both SimpleXML and XMLReader, which
is easier and faster than SAX, offer additional parsing approaches. All
the XML extensions are now based on the libxml2 library by the GNOME
project. This unified library allows for interoperability between the
different extensions. In PHP5, there are totally new and rewritten
extensions for parsing XML. Those that load the entire XML document
into memory include SimpleXML, the DOM, and the XSLT processor. Those
parsers that provide you with one piece of the XML document at a time
include the Simple API for XML (SAX) and XMLReader. SAX functions the
same way it did in PHP4, but it's not based on the expat library
anymore, but on the libxml2 library. If you are familiar with the DOM
from other languages, you will have an easier time coding with the DOM
in PHP5 than previous versions. SimpleXML shares many of the advantages
of the DOM and is more easily coded. It allows easy access to an XML
tree, has built-in validation and XPath support, and is interoperable
with the DOM, giving it read and write support for XML documents. You
can code documents parsed with SimpleXML simply and quickly. Remember
however, that, like the DOM, SimpleXML comes with a price for its ease
and flexibility if you load a large XML document into memory. The
XMLReader extension is a stream-based parser of the type often
referred to as a cursor type or pull parser. XMLReader pulls
information from the XML document on request. It is based on the API
derived from C# XmlTextReader. It is included and enabled in PHP 5.1
by default and is based on libxml2.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xmlphp2.html

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Swift for Grid Workflow Management
Greg Nawrocki, InfoWorld Blog

'Grid' doesn't necessarily mean a single program but could be a series
of programs or even simple scripts that tie together to form what is
often called a workflow. Essentially any set of processes for getting
real work done. In the case of workflows the complexity of task
management is added to by the complexities of data management for the
effective sharing of data sets amongst the tasks of a workflow. The
folks over at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago,
a close relative of those that brought us the Globus Toolkit understand
these complexities and have introduced Swift. Swift is an open source
(naturally) software component that can be used to manage access to
Grid services including those associated with the Globus Toolkit. From
the web site: "Swift is a system for the rapid and reliable specification,
execution, and management of large-scale science and engineering
workflows. It supports applications that execute many tasks coupled by
disk-resident datasets - as is common, for example, when analyzing
large quantities of data or performing parameter studies or ensemble
simulations. The open source Swift software combines: (1) A simple
scripting language to enable the concise, high-level specifications of
complex parallel computations, and mappers for accessing diverse data
formats in a convenient manner. (2) An execution engine that can manage
the dispatch of many (100,000+) tasks to many (1000+) processors,
whether on parallel computers, campus grids, or multi-site grids.
According to the SwiftScript Language Reference Manual, "VDL is a
language for workflow specification in Data Grid environments which
defines a language for describing operations on typed data items and
mechanisms for binding data items defined in this language to datasets
stored on persistent storage. The binding between data item and dataset
is based on the XDTM (XML dataset typing and mapping) model, which
separates the declaration of the logical structure of datasets from
their physical representation. The logical structure is specified via
a subset of XML Schema, where a physical representation is defined by
a mapping descriptor, which describes how each element in the dataset's
VDL representation can be mapped to a corresponding physical structure
such as a directory, file, or database table..."

http://weblog.infoworld.com/gridmeter/archives/2007/03/swift_for_grid.html
See also the language reference: http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/swift/guides/languagespec.php

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The Tools of the Master Forecaster
Carlos A. Soto, Government Computer News

Business intelligence software can guide managers through difficult
decisions, report anomalies or issues in an organization, and help
managers check on the condition of their agency. BI software can
examine the present state of affairs and analyze past performance
trends. If used effectively, the right business intelligence tools can
even predict the future... Two broad types of programs make up business
intelligence software tools. The first type is the database, or the
software-and-server combo that holds the data. Most often, organizations
use transactional databases like an enterprise resource planning (ERP)
database. Different flavors of ERP software include products from
Oracle Corp. and SAP AG. Relational databases, like Microsoft SQL
Server, are another common form of database, particularly in the federal
sector. Despite the importance of these databases, the following review
focuses on products that make up the second part of the business
intelligence topology: reporting, querying and analyzing tools that
extract information from the aggregated data sources, like SQL, and
allow the user to find, manipulate and demonstrate the data.... Many
business intelligence software companies use the analogy that business
intelligence tools help diagnose the condition of a company or agency
in a manner similar to how blood tests and X-ray scans are used to map
the condition of a patient. ProfitMetrics takes that concept one step
further by stating that the problem isn't in the analysis or numbers,
but in the way the analysis and numbers are displayed. ProfitMetrics
relies exclusively on Extensible Markup Language in configuring the
charts and converting the numbers into visual artifacts. So an XML
editor configures the way in which the data will be displayed by
creating an XML Dashboard Description file and merging that file with
the input file that contains the metrics or raw data of your
organization. Finally a quick rendering engine produces a high-density
dashboard that can be printed out in PDF format or viewed dynamically
on the Web in a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format... iDashboards
complies with a multitude of Web and database standards such as Java 2
Enterprise Edition, XML, Open Database Connectivity (Oracle) and
Microsoft Windows .Net to get your high-density reports up and running
within a week, typically two to three days.

http://www.gcn.com/print/26_05/43264-1.html

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