XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 13 March 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 13 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
SAP AG  http://www.sap.com

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HEADLINES:

* SIP Basics and Beyond
* A Lesson in SOA Model-Based Management
* NCSA Spotlights Digital Library Technologies
* OAGi and HR-XML Consortium Announce Architectural Alignment
* VC Firm, Ex-Microsoft Execs Back Internet OS Company
* XML for PHP Developers: Add XSLT to DOM and SimpleXML APIs
* No (Showstopping) Contradictions in OpenXML?
* Microsoft FAT Patent Fails in Germany

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SIP Basics and Beyond
Robert Sparks, ACM Queue

Chances are you're already using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol),
since it is one of the key innovations driving the current evolution of
communications systems. SIP is an open standard developed by the IETF.
It has a large and active implementation community: nearly 100 unique
implementations were present at each of the recent SIP Forum SIPit
(SIP Interoperability Test) events. SIP is a transaction-oriented,
text-based protocol. Its messages are similar in syntax to HTTP, but
there is little similarity in protocol behavior. SIP endpoints, also
known as UAs (user-agents), can both generate and answer requests. SIP
URIs appear in several places in SIP messages: the RURI (Request-URI)
in the first line of a request determines where the request is going
to go -- in essence, this is to whom the request is targeted. Some
URIs may be GRUUs (Globally Routable User-agent URIs); these URIs are
similar to AoRs in that they are long-lived -- they could be placed on
a business card or in an e-mail signature. SIP also provides a
publish-subscribe mechanism called SIP Events that lets elements learn
about state changes elsewhere in the network. For example, a service
can subscribe to the dialog state of a UA to learn when it becomes
available, making it easy to build a camp-on or call-back service. The
most powerful event currently available, however, is presence. This
event, defined by the IETF's SIMPLE working group (SIP for Instant
Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions), conveys information
about the end user's availability and willingness to communicate. This
RPID (rich presence information) ranges from where the user is
(geographic location) to what he or she is doing (driving, meeting,
or eating, for example) and even what kind of environment he or she
is in (such as a movie theater). SIP provides a framework for
developing communications systems. It is not just a simple telephony
application protocol. It is being used to construct peer-to-peer
systems, residential telephony services, PBX replacement systems, and
large-scale carrier next-generation networks, such as the IMS (IP
Multimedia Subsystem) of the 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership
Project).

http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=465
See also IETF SIP Working Group: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/sip-charter.html

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A Lesson in SOA Model-Based Management
William Vambenepe

WS-ResourceTransfer, or WS-RT, plays at the intersection of SOA and
model-based management. While its goals are modest and its usage will
often be hidden, it meets a critical need in allowing model-driven
interactions to be conducted in an SOA. WS-RT defines a set of Simple
Object Access Protocol messages that are used to provide flexible
access to a model-driven service. It is fully compliant with the
WS-Transfer specification (a World Wide Web Consortium submission that
is one of the components of WS-Management) on which it is based. But
while WS-Transfer allows access to the entire representation of the
model of a system that is being accessed (in order to read, update,
create or destroy it), WS-RT lets individual parts be specified. This
capability is useful when interacting with models of individual
resources (such as a server) and is critical in interacting with large
models that represent complex systems (such as a data center), in
which case interacting with the entire model is impractical. The
improvements that WS-RT adds to the WS-Transfer Create operation allows
one to specify parts of the model of the system to create. For example,
when asking for a server to be provisioned, one might want to specify
what operating system it should run and how much memory it should have.
But in general the creator doesn't want to have to specify what IP
address the server should be assigned (even though this information is
part of the model of the server). Rather, the IP address will be
assigned automatically at the time of provisioning.

http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=011000PNR7MQ
See also WS-RT references: http://xml.coverpages.org/computingResourceManagement.html#ws-rt

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NCSA Spotlights Digital Library Technologies
Staff, NCSA Digital Library Technologies Group Announcement

NCSA's Digital Library Technologies group, led by Joe Futrelle, develops
tools and techniques to manage semantic content for scientific
applications. This ranges from digital library technology for managing
scientific data to semantic Web technology for integrating distributed,
heterogeneous metadata while maintaining its semantic integrity. The
group's primary project is the Tupelo Semantic Content Repository,
which provides tools for managing data across distributed heterogeneous
semantic storage technologies such as RDF triple stores and content
management systems. Tupelo is designed for archiving large-scale,
complex scientific data and metadata collections; it is also suitable
for more conventional digital libraries containing Dublin Core or other
standard digital library metadata schemas. Its RDF-based metadata
framework can support a wide variety of schemas, from simple, flat-
namespace schemas such as Dublin Core, to hierarchical models derived
from XML Schema, to more web-like models derived from RDF variants.
Futrelle: "Generic tools and techniques that we're developing can
enable data management infrastructure to be more easily extended to
support specialized use cases without requiring extensive domain-
specific development. Semantic Web technologies lend themselves to
loosely coupled environments like science cyber-environments, where
centralization of data resources is impractical." Futrelle says his
group acts in almost a consulting role to a range of NCSA projects
and collaborators, assisting them with issues of integrating
heterogeneous data and moving from data stovepipes to more flexible,
loosely coupled strategies. DLT collaborators include NCSA's Automated
Learning Group, which is also using semantic Web technologies; the
TRECC visualization group, which is involved with developing interfaces
to semantic content repositories for ECID; Tom Habing, a research
programmer at Grainger Engineering Library, and other Grainger staff
involved with the ECHO-DEP project; and several researchers from the
Graduate School of Library and Information Science, including Janet
Eke, David Dubin, and J. Stephen Downie.

http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/1316213.html

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OAGi and HR-XML Consortium Announce Architectural Alignment
Staff, Open Applications Group and the HR-XML Consortium

A joint announcement from OAGi and HR-XML Consortium reports that work
has begun on a project to align the business language standards
produced by the two organizations. The planned architectural alignment
represents a significant step forward for enterprise application
interoperability. The Open Applications Group Integration Specification
(OAGIS) is "the world's largest and most implemented business language
standard. OAGIS covers a diverse set of enterprise functions, including
purchasing, manufacturing, and supply-chain management. The HR-XML
Consortium is the recognized authority on, and leading source of,
global interoperability standards for human resources management. The
architectural alignment by the Open Applications Group and HR-XML
promises to give enterprises an expanded and unified business language
for wide-ranging integration needs. Once the alignment project is
complete, the HR-XML and OAGIS libraries will be packaged separately,
but will be structured so enterprises wanting to leverage both libraries
will be able to install them together. Other key features planned for
the alignment are: (1) Leveraging OAGIS Business Object Documents (BODs)
for HR-XML message design; (2) Incorporating the OAGIS implementation
of the UN/CEFACT harmonized core components within HR-XML; (3) Adhering
to common naming and design rules and a common schema modularity model;
(4) Reusing from each library, relevant content from the other.

http://www.hr-xml.org/blog/?p=128
See also the OAGi web site: http://www.openapplications.org/

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VC Firm, Ex-Microsoft Execs Back Internet OS Company
Elizabeth Montalbano, InfoWorld

A venture capital firm has given a $10 million boost to a Swedish
company that could soon be in the competitive crosshairs of Google
and Microsoft. Swedish venture company Northzone Ventures will help
Xcerion AB emerge from stealth mode to launch its Web-based OS and
related marketplace for hosted software later this year, said Xcerion
CEO Daniel Arthursson, in an interview with the IDG News Service.
Xcerion has developed an OS that works from within a browser, which
developers can use to build Web-based versions of existing software
or new applications quickly and without having to build separate
versions for different computer OSes, he said. The company also will
host the applications and make them available in an online marketplace.
Users can choose to either run ad-supported versions of the
applications for free, or pay a small yearly fee -- about $5 or $10
per year -- to run them is ad-free, Arthursson said. The company will
manage subscriptions for third-party vendors and give them about 80
percent or 90 percent of the subscription revenue, while keeping a
small percentage for its hosting and management services, he said.
Users also can run applications built on Xcerion's XML Internet OS
when they are offline, Arthursson said. Any information saved when
they are running the application offline will be immediately updated
to the online version when they reconnect to the Internet. Xcerion
is hoping to do for Web-based business application development what
Microsoft did for applications development on the desktop. From the
company Inspiration statement: "We strongly believe in social
computing, enabling user participation and that the Internet
eventually will become the operating system. All information will
eventually be stored in XML format -- enabling access from any device
or service."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/13/HNexcerionboost_1.html
See also the Xcerion AB web site: http://www.xcerion.com/

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XML for PHP Developers: Add XSLT to DOM and SimpleXML APIs
Cliff Morgan, IBM developerWorks

This article "Part 3: Advanced techniques to read, manipulate, and write
XML" is the final installment in a three-part series which discusses
more techniques for reading, manipulating, and writing XML in PHP5.
PHP5 offers the developer a lot more muscle to work with XML. New and
modified extensions such as the DOM, SimpleXML, and XSL make working
with XML less code intensive. In PHP5, the DOM is compliant with the
W3C standard. Most importantly, the interoperability among these
extensions is significant, providing additional functionality, like
swapping formats to extend usability, W3C's XPath, and more, across the
board.  The article focuses on the now familiar APIs DOM and SimpleXML
in more sophisticated surroundings, and, for the first time in this
series, discusses the XSL extension. The examples in this article use
Yahoo's search API, PHP5, and REpresentational State Transfer (REST) to
illustrate the use of the DOM in an interesting application environment.
Yahoo chose REST because of a common belief among developers that REST
offers 80% of SOAP's benefits at 20% of the cost. The SimpleXML
extension is a tool of choice for manipulating an XML document, provided
that the XML document isn't too complicated or too deep, and contains
no mixed content. SimpleXML is easier to code than the DOM, as its name
implies. It is far more intuitive if you work with a known document
structure. Greatly increasing the flexibility of the DOM and SimpleXML
the interoperative nature of the libXML2 architecture allows imports to
swap formats from DOM to SimpleXML and back at will. PHP5's
implementation of the W3C standard supports interoperability with the
DOM and XPath. EXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) is
an XML extension based on libxml2, and its stylesheets are XML documents.
XSLT transforms an XML source tree into an XML or XML-type result tree.
These transformations apply the series of rules specified in the
stylesheet to the XML data. XSLT can add or remove elements or
attributes to or from the output file. It allows the developer to sort
or rearrange elements and make decisions about what elements to hide
or display. Different stylesheets allow for your XML to be displayed
appropriately for different media, such as screen display versus print
display.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xmlphp3.html

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No (Showstopping) Contradictions in OpenXML?
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Articles

Erc Lai at ComputerWorld is reporting that JTC1 has accepted Ecma's
responses to the recent contradiction review, and that matters are
proceding to the next phase of the voting as normal... So the Ecma spec
is now at the "Draft International Standard" stage (DIS). In five
months time, as I understand it, there will be a ballot of the national
bodies that are P-members of SC34 (participating members, rather than
observers). In ISO procedure, there are votes for "abstain", "yes", "no"
and "no with comments". I expect that OpenXML will have a lot of "No
with comments", which happens sometimes. These comments give all the
technical (and perhaps IPR) issues that have been found that are
showstoppers, together with other misc comments. After this ballot,
we all wait two or three months. This gives everyone time to draw their
breaths, gird their loins, examine each other's positions, and prepare
responses. Then there a ballot resolution meeting, at which all the
issues are dealt with; the meeting may respond with a fix to the DIS,
or with a comment that this is an issue for further study and
enhancement, or they may to decline to fix the problem, or they may
say that it is not a problem in their opinion. Then Ecma takes these
on board, makes the appropriate changes, and this becomes the FDIS,
the "Final Draft International Standard". The FDIS then gets sent
around to the national bodies, and a vote is taken after 30 days. So
we are talking, 1 month admin review (contradiction) + 1 month
(Ecma response) + 5 months (detail review) + 2month (collection) + 2
months (resolution) + 1 month (pre-vote). A Fast Track standard with
any controversy actually has about 13 months of review time before the
final vote minimum... What is important to realize is that even though
JTC1 may have found that Ecma's responses to the contradiction issues
are satisfactory enough to let matters proceed, it does not mean that
therefore the issues themselves go away. It is not JTC1s job to make
technical decisions but procedural ones, is one way to put it. I expect
that some of the issues will be re-put at the DIS ballot, some will
have been answered by the Ecma response already, and there will
probably be some more. The DIS ballot resolution process looks like
being a long and difficult job, but it will make the claims that
OpenXML had no input from an open process fairly untenable; probably
ODF should have had the same amount of scrutiny.

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/03/no_showstopping_contradictions.html
See also Office Open XML: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm

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Microsoft FAT Patent Fails in Germany
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Linux-Watch

While the U.S. courts recently reaffirmed Microsoft's FAT (File
Allocation Table) patents, the German Patent Federal Court has just
dismissed the patent for use in Germany.  According to a report in the
German news publication Heise Online, the court has denied the
protection that the European Patent Office granted to Microsoft under
EP 0618540 for a "common namespace for long and short filenames." This
was based on Microsoft's US Patent No. 5,758,352. The German Patent
Court stated that the patent claims Microsoft made are "not based on
inventive activity." FAT is a file system that Windows and other
operating systems use to track the clusters of data that make up files
on mass storage devices, such as hard drives or USB memory sticks. In
Linux circles, it's best known for its use in the Samba server
application. Samba enables Windows PCs to read and write files on
Linux servers, and allows Linux desktops to access Windows servers.
Microsoft has been willing to license FAT to European vendors for
prices ranging from US $0.25 per unit to a one-time payment in full
of US $250,000 per company. No Linux distributor, however, has ever
admitted to paying such a fee.

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS9467496750.html

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