XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 08 February 2007
A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org
Edited by Robin Cover
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This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com
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HEADLINES:
* Yahoo: Pipe in Data, Then Mash It Up
* Grid Initiatives Part 2
* ISO 639-3 Language Codes Released with SIL as Registration
Authority
* Forrester Narrows List of Specs for Web Services
* Nokia Offers Free Mapping Program, Phone Search
* HP to Offer New Support Services to Users Adopting SAP's
Enterprise
SOA Approach
* Mozilla Updates Firefox 3.0 Preview
* XML Parsing Techniques With Perl: Tree Parsing and
Event-Driven
Parsing
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Yahoo: Pipe in Data, Then Mash It Up
Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com
Yahoo wants more mashups. The Web giant on Wednesday
released Yahoo
Pipes, a hosted visual-development tool that lets people
manipulate
data feeds from Web sites to create new applications.
Mashup
applications combine data from different Web services; some
of the
most popular mashups involve taking data from one source,
such as real-
estate listings, and displaying them on Web-based mapping
services.
With Yahoo Pipes, which is in beta, the company is trying to
give
developers and tech-savvy users more power in combining
structured data
feeds, typically done through the Really Simple Syndication
or Atom
protocols. Although the service currently works only with
RSS and Atom
feeds, Yahoo intends to expand the number of data sources
with which
people can work. It also plans to allow third parties to
create add-on
modules and to expand the service's information output
composition to
include formats such as maps. For example, someone can use
Yahoo Pipes
to combine multiple Web calendar feeds to display as one. He
can
customize news alerts to filter through several news feeds,
and he can
create an individualized eBay price watcher that monitors an
RSS feed
to find items within a certain price range. The technical
inspiration
for Yahoo Pipes comes from Unix, an operating system with
which
programmers can establish a pipeline of connected data
sources.
http://n
ews.com.com/2100-1032_3-6157508.html
See also the Tim O'Reilly Blog: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/pipes_an
d_filte.html
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Grid Initiatives Part 2
Wolfgang Gentzsch, The Grid Today
While the Web offers easy access to mostly static
information via
Hypertext, the Grid adds another fundamental layer to the
Internet,
by enabling direct access to and use of underlying
resources, such
as computers, storage, scientific instruments and
experiments, sensors,
applications, data, and middleware services. Based on
widely accepted
grid and web services standards, resources communicate with
each other
and deliver results as services back to the user. These
resources are
part of a service-oriented architecture, called OGSA, the
Open Grid
Services. Simply speaking, grid middleware interconnects all
the
distributed resources in a network. Light-weight software
sensors,
often called daemons or agents, reside within each resource,
monitoring
its status, providing resources with work, and reporting
their status
back to the 'supervisor' software and then to the user. All
interfaces
between the heterogeneous components (services) are
standardized, e.g.,
via the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) and thus
enable full
interoperability among them. Over the past 12 months, major
grid
projects have been studied to better understand how to
successfully
design, build, manage and operate large Community Grids,
based on the
experience of early adopters and on case studies and lessons
learned
from these grid projects. In the first part of the article,
we mainly
focus on the major results of our study on large community
grid
initiatives: the lessons learned and the recommendations for
those who
want to design, build and run similar grid infrastructures.
This
article presents additional general information about these
six grid
initiatives: The ChinaGrid, D-Grid, EGEE, NAREGI, TeraGrid,
and the
UK e-Science Initiative. In 2002, the Chinese Ministry of
Education
(MoE) launched the largest grid project in China, called the
ChinaGrid,
aiming at providing the nationwide grid computing platform
and services
for research and education among 100 key universities in
China. The
current version, CGSP 2.0, is based on Globus Toolkit 4.0,
and is WSRF
and OGSA compatible. The full report is presented in
"Grid Initiatives:
Lessons Learned and Recommendations" [Wolfgang
Gentzsch, RENCI, Duke,
and D-Grid, January 21, 2007].
http://www
.gridtoday.com/grid/1245130.html
See also the full report: http://www.renci.org/publication
s/reports/Grid_Initiatives_Jan_22_2007_final.doc
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ISO 639-3 Language Codes Released with SIL as Registration
Authority
Staff, SIL Announcement
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has
announced
the formal release of ISO 639-3 to comprehensively provide
three-letter
codes for the world's languages. International communication
requires
global standards that identify any given language. Unique
codes are
useful for a variety of applications such as specifying the
language
need for an interpreter or setting the language of an
Internet web site.
For many of the world's minority languages, it serves not
only to grant
bona fide recognition to the speakers, but also as an
authoritative
crosscheck for researchers. ISO 639-3 provides a unique
three-letter
code for 7,546 human languages, whether living, extinct,
ancient,
historical or artificial. ISO 639-1 and -2 are existing
standards
commissioned in the 1990s. The new standard, released
February 5, 2007,
greatly expands upon the 478 codes formerly provided by ISO
639-2,
having the goal of comprehensive coverage for human
languages. In 2002,
the ISO invited SIL International to propose an expanded
list because
of its worldwide experience compiling data about minority
languages for
the Ethnologue, which lists 6,912 living languages (15th
edition). Most
of the additions from living and extinct languages were
derived from
the Ethnologue. The additional ancient, historical or
artificial
languages were obtained primarily from Linguist List. ISO
639-3 also
introduces the concept of one code for a 'macrolanguage' as
well as
individual codes for each variety, a very useful feature for
closely
related language clusters such as Chinese, Arabic or Cree.
As the
Registration Authority, SIL International processes updates
of
registered language codes and distributes information on
pending and
adopted changes. Knowledge of languages at any point in time
will
never be complete. Given the comprehensive nature of ISO
639-3, changes
to the code set are inevitable, especially in respect to
lesser-known
languages. An updated version of the code set will be
released once
each year.
http:/
/www.sil.org/sil/news/2007/iso-639-3.htm
See also Language Identifiers: ht
tp://xml.coverpages.org/languageIdentifiers.html
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Forrester Narrows List of Specs for Web Services
Rich Seeley, SearchWebServices.com
Web services developers can spend time keeping track of all
the
standards floating around or they can devote their time and
energy to
the few they need for the project they are working on, which
is the
advice analyst Randy Heffner offers. Heffner, vice
president, Forrester
Research, Inc., has expended a lot of time the past few
months studying
SOA and Web services specs and surveying developers working
with them
and has concluded that conservative adopters working on
core
connectivity need little more than SOAP and WSDL. He also
has
recommendations for those he labels more aggressive, but he
warns them
to look before they leap into a standard or spec where there
is little
or no evidence that it will actually work in an application.
"What it
really comes down to is how conservative are you as a
technology adopter
and what immediate business value can you get from any of
these specs,"
he said. "The more conservative you are then the fewer
of these specs
you actually take a look at. If you're more aggressive then
you better
be building budgets for prototyping and testing and proving
these
things out before you commit to using them." Most Web
services
developers will have to work out a balance between those two
extremes,
he said. The standards and specifications for conservatives
and those
for the more aggressive are identified in his Forrester
report titled,
"Web Services Specifications: Core Web Services."
For the conservative
developer, the list is short: SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, SOAP
Messages with
Attachments, WS-I Basic Profile 1.0, and WS-I Basic Profile
1.1. While
SOAP and WSDL hark back to the early days of Web services,
Heffner
said they provide the basic foundation on which myriad other
standards,
proposed standards and vendor specifications rest. "The
key way to
understand the growth of additional specifications is to
view what SOAP
and WSDL give you as a core messaging model," he
explained. "If you've
got two end points and they both support SOAP, and the
development
environment supports WSDL, you get a basic connectivity. All
the other
specs are about improving the quality of service of that
basic
connection." Beyond keeping up with advances in SOAP
and WSDL at W3C,
he recommends that developers keep an eye on what is
happening at Web
Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I)...
http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent
/0,289142,sid26_gci1242859,00.html
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Nokia Offers Free Mapping Program, Phone Search
Nancy Gohring, InfoWorld
Nokia will give away mapping software to its customers as
well as users
of Window Mobile devices. Phones based on Linux and older
Nokia and
Microsoft devices will be supported in the future, the
Finnish mobile
phone maker said. Mobile users can download the Smart2go
maps that
cover 150 countries and include 15 million points of
interest, such as
restaurants and accommodation. Users can store the map data
on a memory
card in the handset. The data can be downloaded over the air
or via a
connection to a PC. Users of phones with GPS (global
positioning service)
or with an external GPS module can subscribe to a
turn-by-turn
navigation service. Subscriptions come in a variety of
packages so
customers can pay for a week's worth of navigation services
for use
while on holiday. Nokia is trying to compete with the
personal navigation
device market but hopes to gain an edge in offering a
different pricing
model. While standalone navigation device makers typically
charge users
for the hardware and the maps up front, Nokia is giving the
maps away
and charging for the navigation services as users need it.
In January at
the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nokia announced
that it
would start giving away maps to Nokia customers and offering
a paid
navigation service. Nokia introduced another free offering
on Thursday,
this one only for certain Nokia phones. Users of 16 Nokia
devices, which
include the N95, N93, N71, N62 and N60, can download a free
application
that lets them search for content on their handsets. Users
can search
for information in calendar entries, SMS messages and
multimedia files.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/08/HNn
okiafreemapping_1.html
See also the announcement: http://w
ww.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1103306
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HP to Offer New Support Services to Users Adopting SAP's
Enterprise SOA
Approach
China Martens, InfoWorld
Hewlett-Packard is offering more services supporting
application vendor
SAP's SOA (service-oriented architecture) approach to IT as
part of the
companies' increasingly close relationship. HP has committed
to make
available a variety of new services to support users as they
move to
adopt SAP's Enterprise SOA (ESOA) approach. The services are
designed
to help very large global SAP customers as they migrate from
older
versions of the vendor's R/3 applications to the newer
SOA-focused mySAP
versions, according to Tim Treat, manager of worldwide
packaged
applications for enterprise applications services at HP.
Such a
migration is highly complex involving not only the upgrading
of software,
but also refreshing of servers and storage to support the
new
applications. In February 2006, HP announced a similar
intensification
of SOA services to support SAP's main applications rival
Oracle and
its Fusion middleware. HP's new move will position HP as
offering the
same level of SOA services for SAP as the vendor already
does for Oracle.
The new HP services will support core elements of SAP's
NetWeaver
middleware and will include programs like workforce
integration for
NetWeaver Portal and information integration for NetWeaver
Business
Intelligence. The services target the different stages of an
ESOA
implementation from the initial envisioning of the IT system
through
governance, development and deployment. Close to 50 percent
of all SAP's
global installations run on HP hardware. HP knows exactly
what's
involved since it's going through the same process as other
SAP
customers. Treat said HP has the world's fifth largest SAP
application
implementation with many of the company's 150,000 employees
having
access to the vendor's software. Like many other companies,
HP has
amassed multiple versions of R/3 over the years particularly
as a
result of acquisitions like that of Digital Equipment Corp.
(DEC) and
later Compaq. Implementing the SOA approach can take
anywhere from one
to three years, Treat said.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/29/HNhpsapsoa_
1.html
See also the announcement: http://xml.
coverpages.org/HP-SOA-SAP.html
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Mozilla Updates Firefox 3.0 Preview
Gregg Keizer, ComputerWorld
Mozilla Corpoation has released the second alpha version of
what will
become its Firefox 3.0 Web browser. The release is the
latest milestone
in a plan to put the open-source browser in users' hands
during the
second half of the year [2007]. Dubbed "Gran
Paradiso," the preview is
still geared toward "Web application developers and our
testing
community," according to release notes on the Mozilla
site. The company
warned general users to steer clear and stick with the 2.0.x
and 1.5.x
production versions. Among the changes to the second alpha
are
enhancements in the way Web pages render incrementally --
while images
load or dynamic changes are made to a page, for example.
Other changes
include improvements in the browser's interaction with Mac
OS X widgets
and the addition of full support for ACID2 test compliance.
Firefox 3.0,
which is based on the new Gecko 1.9 layout engine, will be
the first
Mozilla browser to drop support for Windows 95, 98 and
Millennium, as
well as for Mac OS X 10.2 and earlier. Alpha 2 can be
downloaded in
Windows, Mac OS X and Linux versions from the Mozilla Web
site. [Note:
"Acid2 is a test page for web browsers published by The
Web Standards
Project (WaSP). It has been written to help browser vendors
make sure
their products correctly support features that web designers
would like
to use. Acid2 tests features that web designers have been
requesting.
Everything that Acid2 tests is specified in a Web standard,
but not all
Web standards are tested. Acid2 does not guarantee
conformance with any
specification. After careful consideration, we have selected
and are
testing the features we consider most important for the
future of the
web. Although Acid2 was inspired by Microsoft's announcement
of IE7, it
is not targeted at a specific browser. We believe Acid2 will
highlight
problems in all current browsers. Acid2 assumes basic
support for HTML4,
CSS1, PNG, and Data URLs. It should be noted that Acid2 is
rendered in
standards mode. That is, the test page includes a DOCTYPE
which signals
that the browser should treat the page according to
standards. Vendors
that are reluctant to make changes in how they render legacy
documents
can continue their current behavior in what is known as
quirks mode."]
http://www.computer
world.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&art
icleId=9010866
See also the Acid2 test page: http:
//www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/guide/
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XML Parsing Techniques With Perl: Tree Parsing and
Event-Driven Parsing
Jim Dixon, IBM developerWorks
This series is a guide to those who need a quick
XML-and-Perl solution.
Part 1 looked at XML::Simple, a tool to integrate XML into a
Perl
application. In this article, Part 2 of the three-part
series, the
author provides an overview of the very complex world of XML
parsing.
First it showed how to convert an XML document into a tree
of objects
in memory. Initially most programmers find this approach
more natural,
and it is indeed more convenient in many ways so long as the
data will
fit in memory. Then it introduces SAX and event-based
parsing, the
approach you must take if your XML document is very large or
is an
unending stream. As it turns out, the tools developed to
deal with
these conditions lend themselves to an entirely different
style of
programming, one that turns out to be very rich: the SAX
pipeline.
Tree parsing: Most programmers will probably find it
comfortable to
view XML as a tree structure. This view of XML was
formalized as the
Document Object Model, the DOM, in a process lasting many
years; DOM
Level 3 was reached in 2002. The DOM represents an XML
document as a
tree of doubly-linked nodes, with the first child at each
level linked
up to its parent and across to siblings. A large set of
functions is
defined on the tree, with implementations in the major
programming
languages. Although you can navigate a DOM tree by following
the links,
it is generally more efficient in terms of programmer time
to use the
XPath protocol. This is a sublanguage allowing navigation to
nodes,
retrieval of sets of nodes, and so forth. The Simple API for
XML (SAX),
takes an entirely different approach to parsing, one that
initially
has a higher overhead. SAX conceives of a document as a
series of
events, and requires that you tell it how to respond to
each. The next
article in this series will show how you can use both of
these
approaches -- DOM and SAX parsing -- in more complex
applications.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks//library/x-x
mlperl2.html
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