XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 08 March 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 08 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:

* Combined Presence Schemas Utilizing RELAX NG
* Establishment of the SVGMap Consortium
* SOA World Magazine "BPEL's Growing Up" -- What's Next?
* Securing Communications in Web Services: A Tutorial
* IBM Safari to Help Developers Navigate Languages
* Sun Shines Ruby Support for Java Developers
* Workshop Report: W3C Web of Services for Enterprise Computing
* Web Application Description Language (WADL)
* Web of Services Workshop Summary and Observations
* NISO License Expression Working Group Progresses XML-based Exchange
* XML Parsing, State Machines, and UTF-32

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Combined Presence Schemas Utilizing RELAX NG
Jari Urpalainen (ed), IETF Internet Draft

IETF has announced the release of an initial Internet Dtaft version of
"Combined Presence Schemas Utilizing RELAX NG." The I-D was produced
by members of the IETF SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging
Extensions (SIMPLE) Working Group. The memo describes a batch of
Presence Information Data Format (PIDF) and its extension schemas
written with the RELAX NG schema language. Within a Common Presence
Profile (CPP) compatible presence system presence data is represented
using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) based Presence Information
Data Format (PIDF). The PIDF format describes the baseline of the
presence instance documents and currently many extensions have been
described: e.g. DataModel, RPID, CIPID, CAPS, LocationTypes, and
TimedStatus. The content model of these XML documents is described
primarily with the W3C XML Schema language. While the W3C XML Schema
language has an extensive amount of impressive properties, for example
the versioning support is still lacking. That is, it is impossible
write reasonable forwards and backwards compatible schemas because of
the "Unique Particle Attribution" constraint described in Appendix H
of the recommendation and because wildcard definitions aren't flexible
enough. Therefore, all the presence extension schemas can not extend
PIDF so that e.g. positions for the new elements could be defined
within the extension schema so that wildcard definitions would still
exist. On the contrary, with the RELAX NG schema language it is
possible to write a reasonable combination of schemas where the
positioning of extensions while retaining wildcard definitions can
easily be done. In other words, these RELAX NG schemas are strict
about extension positions, it is not possible to put extension elements
into "wrong" locations. This memo describes a batch of these schemas
which try to be as compatible as possible with the current presence
W3C XML schemas. The set includes schemas for PIDF, DataModel, RPID,
CIPID, CAPS and LocationTypes. These schemas are more restrictive than
the corresponding W3C XML Schemas, i.e., if instance documents validate
according to these schemas they should also validate with the W3C XML
Schemas, too. These schemas are provided as informative to applications
who wish to utilize RELAX NG as a validation tool.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-urpalainen-simple-presence-relaxng-03.txt
See also RELAX NG as ISO DSDL, Part 2: http://xml.coverpages.org/dsdl.html#part2

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Establishment of the SVGMap Consortium
Staff, Consortium Announcement

A group of industry partners have announced the formation of an SVGMap
Consortium to develop browsing software for electronic maps utilizing
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and to provide map delivery
infrastructure provisioning services in SVG format.  The founders
include System Engineering Consultants Co., Ltd., ZENRIN Co., Ltd, KAI
Software, Inc., and Indigo Corporation. The purposes of the consortium
include studies of the usability of SVG in businesses and information
infrastructure, dissemination and promotion of the application
developments and the system integrations using SVG, dissemination and
promotion of the exchange infrastructure developments and the system
integrations using SVG, acquisition, exchange and provision of
information regarding SVG, establishment of the portal aggregating SVG
information, contribution to both domestic and international
standardization (e.g. JIS) activities for such as W3C SVG, MWI, GeoXG,
PlaceXML, and ISO TC211, etc., and resolving issues of supplying "
Provisioning services of electric map browsing software for utilization
of SVG and SVG format map delivery backbone" , and to improve
convenience in introduction of spatio- information applications in WWW.
SVG electric maps are now being used in the Autonomous Movement Support
Project lead by Land, Infrastructure, and transportation Ministry,
and in the DIGITAL JAPAN project operated by Geographic Survey
Institute, the delivery of the background maps is under examination.
Also, JIS(Japanese Industrial Standards) standardization of SVG Tiny
1.2 recommended by W3C is under examination by Ministry of Economy,
Trade and Industries. Based on the background stated above, the
consortium will promote the dissemination of SVG recommended by W3C
that has open-standard data specifications, and the description of
geographical spatio-information and exchange on WWW are possible.

http://blog.svg-map.com/2007/03/about_establish.html
See also W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG): http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/

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SOA World Magazine "BPEL's Growing Up" -- What's Next?
Dave Shaffer and Manoj Das, SYS-CON Websphere

WS-BPEL, also known as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), is
a standard owned by OASIS that provides rich and comprehensive
orchestration semantics. This article will provide a brief overview of
how BPEL came to be what it is today and then focus on the latest
developments in the BPEL standard and where we believe this standards
area will go over the next few years. While the formal standardization
of BPEL is nearing completion at OASIS, it has already gained
significant market traction. Platform vendors such as Oracle are
shipping commercial BPEL engines today and a Google search shows at
least four available open source BPEL implementations WS-BPEL 2.0,
commonly known as BPEL 2.0, is the evolution of BPEL 1.1 as a public
OASIS standard and is currently available as a draft for public review.
Some of the salient changes in BPEL 2.0 from BPEL 1.1 are improved data
access, improved data manipulation, new activities, enriched fault
handling, advanced message operations, syntax improvements, and
clarifications. Involving business stakeholders in the analysis and
modeling of business processes usually leads to fewer development
iterations and a closer match between implementation and business
requirements. This is a very common desire and in many cases the
driver for adopting BPM. While BPEL vendors provide easy-to-use
graphical tools for creating and editing BPEL processes, the very
fact that BPEL processes are so detailed as to be executable makes
these tools too complex for most business users. Business Process
Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard from OAG to address the above
requirement. Using BPMN as a standard notation, business users may
create process blueprints and share them with developers and other
stakeholders. BPMN maps in a straightforward fashion to BPEL and
developers can work on the BPEL view of the process to make it
executable... Process orchestration is already a key component of
integration, SOA, and BPM. BPEL 1.1 is a mature process orchestration
language widely supported by vendors and is successfully addressing
process orchestration requirements at many production customer sites
today. We believe customers who adopt BPEL and related standards for
their BPM and SOA architectures will gain the following benefits:
(1) Comprehensive functionality; (2) Knowledge portability; (3) Toolset
extensibility and "hot-pluggable" products; (4) Interoperability;
(5) Vendor portability. In the very near future, WS-BPEL 2.0 will
further mature the BPEL standard while providing a clean migration
path for current BPEL implementations. Longer-term standards such
as BPEL4People and BPMN will work closely and cleanly with BPEL to
complete the puzzle and will help increase the market adoption of
BPM by mainstream enterprises.

http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/346372.htm
See also the CS to be balloted: http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsbpel/2.0/CS01/wsbpel-v2.0-CS01.html

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Securing Communications in Web Services: A Tutorial
Malla Simhachalam and Marina Sum, Sun Developer Network

Open standards have gained momentum among enterprises as a mechanism
for Web services to communicate with partners, customers, and
suppliers. XML, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and HTTPS are
among the technologies for developing interoperable Web services with
open, flexible, and adaptive interfaces. That inherent openness,
however, poses security risks. Without proper protections, Web
services can expose vulnerabilities that could lead to dire
consequences. Ensuring that those services and their communications
are integral, confidential, and secure is critical for all parties.
Through an example of a stock-quote service, this tutorial steps you
through the process of securing communications between the service's
client and server with Sun Java System Access Manager, the NetBeans
IDE 5.5, and the Java Application Platform Software Development Kit
(SDK) with Tools bundle. It is assumed that you are familiar with
Java and Web-service technologies.  The example uses OpenSSO to
configure identity repositories and users in an Access Manager. 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.

http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/identserver/reference/techart/secure-ws.html
See also OpenSSO Project: https://opensso.dev.java.net/

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IBM Safari to Help Developers Navigate Languages
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Seeking to assist software developers coping with many languages, IBM
plans to offer its Safari technology to the Eclipse open source
community, an IBM official said at the EclipseCon 2007 conference on
Thursday. IBM describes Safari as an Eclipse-based metatooling
framework intended to speed the building of sophisticated development
environments, or IDEs, for new or existing programming languages. The
project is moving toward becoming an open source Eclipse technology
project. The basic idea is to incubate the technology and start to
build a community around it. Developers these days must deal with
multiple languages and technologies, and Safari is intended to make
that easier. IBM has languages being designed that already represent
mixes and interactions between technologies such as Java and SQL.
Safari supports features such as parser management, syntax highlighting,
and re-factoring. Static program analysis and debugging also are goals.
The project offers language service-creation wizards, class libraries,
and "code skeletons" to get a language service-implementer started.
IBM's Web site on Safari said the effort has been driven in part by
the need to build full-featured IDEs for language research activities
at the company. One activity to benefit from Safari is the development
of a JavaScript IDE, taking place at IBM's Tokyo Research Lab. Other
IBM research projects impacted include X10, which is a Java-derived
language; XJ, featuring XML access and Java, and the JikesPG grammar
language specification.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/08/HNeclipsesafari_1.html

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Sun Shines Ruby Support for Java Developers
Andy Patrizio, InternetNews.com

Sun Microsystems furthered its commitment to dynamic languages with
this week's announcement that its NetBeans Java development toolkit
would offer support for Ruby development. The NetBeans Ruby Pack is a
plug-in to the NetBeans IDE that provides support for both Ruby and
JRuby, a pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language
that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. "This is a big deal because
until now, Ruby developers haven't had a lot of IDE support. They just
use plain text editors," according to Tor Norbye, senior staff engineer
at Sun.  "In the Java world we've had lots of features available."
With this support, Ruby developers will get features that programmers
used to using an IDE take for granted, such as syntax highlighting,
navigation outline, project support and unit test execution. The
NetBeans Ruby Pack also offers extended features such as integrated
documentation pop-ups for Ruby API calls, semantic analysis with
highlighting of parameters and unused local variables, as well as
occurrence highlighting. Norbye said that there would also be
ancillary support for developing Ruby on Rails applications as well.
NetBeans would use JRuby behind the scenes to parse the code, and
that Ruby would be included so applications can be run on Java
without having to fully install Ruby on a computer.  According to
the announcement: "The NetBeans Ruby Pack goes beyond basic editing,
syntax highlighting, navigation outline, project support and unit
test execution to provide developers with a rich set of features to
enhance productivity. These features include: code completion for
modules, classes, methods and escape codes within literal strings and
regular expressions. The NetBeans Ruby Pack also offers extended
features such as integrated documentation pop-ups for Ruby API calls,
semantic analysis with highlighting of parameters and unused local
variables, as well as occurrence highlighting."

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3664241
See also Ruby/JRuby Support in NetBeans IDE: http://www.netbeans.org/servlets/NewsItemView?newsItemID=1015

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Workshop Report: W3C Web of Services for Enterprise Computing
Dave Orchard, Blog

Last week I attended and presented the BEA position at the W3C Web of
Services for Enterprise Computing. I don't want to go through all the
various discussion as I think Paul, Jonathan, and Eric do a great job.
I found much of it interesting and useful. Real-world discussion of
how much traction SOAP and WSDL are getting in B2B and enterprise
scenarios was great. I liked the WS-Core WG idea. A number of folks
commented positively on a couple of the W3C TAG findings I'm working
on: versioning and state. However, I had a couple of disappointments.
There was almost no discussion about how enterprise computing is
different from "non-enterprise computing". I argued it might be
something like higher trust in well-behaved clients, so state, security,
extensibility, etc. might be different. But almost no follow through,
though maybe just because I presented midway through the second day.
Given all the angst about Web architecture vs Web services architecture,
I was also surprised that there was no support for technical
reconciliation. I suggested WADL (Web application description language),
to help with enterprises and the desperate perl/python hacker building
stronger typed REST services. And for the flipside, I suggested
improved SOAP to URI/XML bindings so SOAP/WSDL services would be more
easily consumable by REST clients. There were two votes (including mine)
for doing WADL, and 2 votes against doing WADL. I'm still surprised
that there wasn't more support for technical ways of bringing the two
architectures together. Perhaps this is because the way the voting
structure was done, which was pick two items out of about fifteen.

http://www.pacificspirit.com/blog/2007/03/06/w3c_web_of_services_for_enterprise_computing

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Web Application Description Language (WADL)
Marc J. Hadley, Sun Microsystems Technical Paper

Web Application Description Language (WADL) is designed to provide a
machine process-able description of HTTP-based Web applications. While
many existing Web sites are examples of HTTP-based applications, a
large number of those require human cognitive function for successful
non-brittle use. Typically Web applications are based on existing
Web architecture and infrastructure, are platform and programming
language independent, promote re-use of the application beyond the
browser, enable composition with other Web or desktop applications,
and require semantic clarity in content (representations) exchanged
during their use. The latter requirement can be fulfilled by the use
of a self-describing data format such as XML or JSON.  XML is
particularly suitable since it allows the definition of a complete
custom schema for the application domain or the embedding of a custom
micro-format in an existing schema using its extensibility points.
The current state-of-the-art in Web application description is
textual documentation plus one or more data format definitions, e.g.,
XML schemata. Whilst entirely adequate for human consumption, this
level of description precludes the following use cases which require
a more machine-friendly description format: (1) Application Modelling
and Visualization Support for development of resource modelling tools
for resource relationship and choreography analysis and manipulation;
(2) Code Generation Automated generation of stub and skeleton code
and code for manipulation of resource representations; (3)
Configuration Configuration of client and server using a portable
format... an example of a WADL description for the Yahoo News Search
application [is provided]. Note the similarity between the Atom
service document and WADL: both describe a set of resources and
methods that may be applied to them. In the case of an Atom service
document the applicable methods are implicit based on the member-type
of a collection. An Atom service document also defines some additional
metadata (the feed title) specific to the protocol domain. One could
replicate the information in an Atom service document using WADL.

https://wadl.dev.java.net/wadl20061109.pdf
See also the WADL project at Java.net: https://wadl.dev.java.net/

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Web of Services Workshop Summary and Observations
Eric Newcomer, Blog

From the W3C "Workshop on Web of Services for Enterprise Computing":
It was clear that both the Web (REST) and Web services (WS-*) are
being successfully used in production applications today. The usage
patterns seem to substantiate my view that Web services are more often
used in enterprise IT environments that predate the Web. Most of the
users who attended the workshop -- and they tended to represent large,
established organizations -- said that they are using Web services in
what I'd call mission-critical or operational applications. It was
also very clear that many of the same organizations are successfully
using Web technologies in mission critical/operational applications.
Some of us -- myself included -- took the position that both
technologies can and should co-exist, and that it would be good if the
W3C could help define how this could and should happen. I thought Noah
Mendelsohn's paper was really great, and probably the best presentation
as well. But of course my reaction was perhaps predisposed because of
my thinking that a hybrid or combined solution is what the industry
needs... The SOAP 1.2 GET feature, WSDL 2.0, and WS-Addressing endpoint
reference mechanisms are integral to Noah's recommendation, but not
yet widely implemented (with the exception of WS-Addressing EPRs, but
this is a variation on the issue that I'll explain later). This is
directly related to part of the discussion during the Workshop, about
how the issues the Web community has with Web services relate more to
how the specifications have been implemented (or not implemented, as
the case may be) than with the specifications themselves. Achieving an
impact in this area may be somewhat challenging, but this may be one
of the things to evaluate in the context of going forward.

http://blogs.iona.com/newcomer/archives/000467.html
See also the W3C Workshop papers: http://www.w3.org/2007/01/wos-ec-program.html

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NISO License Expression Working Group Progresses XML-based Exchange
Staff, NISO Announcement

NISO (National Information Standards Organization) has provided an
update on the activities in its License Expression Working Group. This
Group was formed to develop a single standard for the exchange of
license information between publishers and libraries. This effort was
specifically not intended to develop Digital Rights Management (DRM)
controls. Instead, the focus is on a license expression schema that
will allow machine-to-machine transmission of license terms at any
level of granularity. Intentional ambiguity in license provisos is
considered acceptable, even desirable, and such ambiguity needs to be
supported in any developed schemas. The Working Group consists of 60
members representing libraries, publishers, rights organizations, ERM
vendors, content aggregators, and related professional and trade
associations. Update: (1) Schema Mapping: A draft mapping of the ERMI
and the ONIX-PL (Publisher License) schemas was completed, resulting
in recommended changes to both organizations in the handling of
authorized users, uses, pricing, term and termination, and in perpetual
access and archiving. (2) Requirements: Work continues on defining
stakeholder needs. Some library customers are interested in two-way
electronic communication with publishers and a final XML version of
the agreement committed to their ERM systems. Consortia customers
also want to be able to transmit this information to their library
members in a way that facilitates its onward transmission to end
users. (3) Licensing Terms XML Message Format: The latest working
draft dated March 2, 2007 incorporates the result of testing and
extending the format through a series of Book Industry Communication
(BIC) projects funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee
(JISC) of the UK Further and Higher Education funding councils,
through analysis of licenses used by the California Digital Library,
and through discussions with participants in the License Expression
Working Group. (4) Tools: A need for shared tools to assist in
implementation of license expression formats was identified. The
ONIX team has already developed some functional requirements for
ONIX-PL editing tools.

http://www.niso.org/committees/License_Expression/LicenseEx_story.html
See also License Expression Working Group: http://www.niso.org/committees/License_Expression/LicenseEx_comm.html

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XML Parsing, State Machines, and UTF-32
Michael Day, O'Reilly Technical Blog

Michael Day, founder of YesLogic and the designer of Prince, an XML +
CSS formatter and a great way of getting web content onto paper:
"I would like to get straight into talking about XML parsing and UNICODE
encodings. In Prince we use libxml2 for all of our XML and HTML parsing
needs, and have been very happy with it. However, it's always
interesting to see new approaches for XML parsing that may offer greater
speed or convenience than existing methods. Last year, Tim Bray released
the state machine that he used for parsing XML in Lark. His state
machine operates on UNICODE characters (technically character classes
in some cases), so it requires a separate decoding step to turn the
incoming stream of bytes into characters first. What about parsing XML
with a state machine that operates directly on bytes instead of
characters, would that lead to any opportunities for clever performance
optimisations? Now, there is a good reason for defining an XML state
machine in terms of UNICODE characters: it means that you only need
to define it once, whereas if you define it in terms of bytes then you
will need to define it multiple times, once for each encoding that you
wish to support. However, given a state machine that operates on
characters and the definition of an encoding, it should be possible
to programmatically generate an equivalent state machine specifically
for that encoding that operates directly on bytes, so we can pretend
that this issue is not too serious. When I sat down and tried sketching
out a simple XML state machine that operates on bytes I immediately hit
a snag in Appendix F of the XML specification: Detection Without
External Encoding Information. The problem occurs when an XML parser
examines the document to determine its encoding. If the state machine
starts reading the document and finds that the first byte is "FF" and
the second is "FE", what state should it be in? Ideally, it should be
able to say that it has just read a little-endian UTF-16 byte order
mark, and continue to parse the document. However, if the following
two bytes are both zero, then it means that the "FF FE" was actually
the start of a little-endian UTF-32 byte order mark. Checking this
requires two bytes of look-ahead, or hundreds of additional states
and transitions in the state machine, which sucks. A much cleaner
solution springs to mind: don't bother supporting UTF-32. Who uses it,
anyway?

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/03/does_anyone_use_utf32_anyone_a.html

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