Paul Kulchenko: xml

EAI Journal: The Web Services Scandal; How Data Semantics Have Been Overlooked in Integration Solutions.

"At best, the lessons we’ve learned from industry’s work with EDI have shown us that:

Defining standard vocabularies is difficult and time-consuming.
Once defined, standards don’t adapt well.
People don’t implement standards correctly anyway.

Today’s Web services scandal is that:

The hype around dynamic discovery is overblown.
Vendors aren’t focused on the semantic element of the problem.
One wonders if the technology’s evolution is not misdirected."

That's probably why documents should be the primary focus and the way you send bytes and bits is of secondary importance. Build your vocabularies, define your semantics, structure your documents, then talk about SOAP, REST or pigeon mail to deliver them.

IBM was quick to release implementation of BPEL4WS called BPWS4J the very same day specification was published (which is today, August 9). More info from one of the co-authors, Sanjiva Weerawarana: "BPWS4J consists of two parts: an engine and an editor. The BPWS4J Engine is an all-Java implementation of BPEL4WS that runs in a
servlet container. The BPWS4J Editor is an Eclipse plugin that can be used with Eclipse v2.0+ (http://www.eclipse.org/)."

As it turns out, Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or WS-BPEL) represents the merging of WSFL and XLANG specs. Wow! Two other specs. WS-Coordination: Describes an extensible framework for providing protocols that coordinate the actions of distributed applications. WS-Transaction: Describes coordination types that are used with the extensible coordination framework described in WS-Coordination.

CNET: Tech giants back new Web services. "Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems plan to announce new specifications Monday that the companies hope will help drive adoption of Web services. The first specification--called Business Process Execution Language for Web Services--is a programming language for defining how to combine Web services to accomplish a particular task. Web services are emerging methods of writing software that allows businesses to interact via the Internet. The second, WS-Coordination, describes how individual Web services within that task interact. A software programmer, for example, can stitch together Web services into a sequence of operations to accomplish a particular task. The third specification, called WS-Transaction, is used to ensure that transactions all complete successfully or fail as a group." I'm wondering what are the relationships between newly created BPEL4WS, and XLANG (Microsoft), WSFL/WSXL (IBM) and WSCL (HP) specs?

Sam Ruby: REST + SOAP. "In reality, there aren't two sides. There are at least four: Everything is a resource. Everything is a get. Everything is a message. Everything is a procedure." I think Sam again got it right. It's not about on what side you are, it's about how you can productively use both approaches.

Aaron Crane: Why XML is technologically terrible, but you have to use it anyway. Largely because everybody is doing it (and besides it's not that terrible).

Steve Pepper: The TAO of Topic Maps. "The generality and expressive power of the topic map model bring with it other advantages that go far beyond those traditionally associated with indexes. The close similarity to semantic nets gives an idea of how topic maps, even without any occurrences connecting them to an information pool, can become valuable resources in their own right. This in turn opens up new business opportunities for creating and selling “portable topic maps” that can be overlaid on multiple information pools. For traditional commercial publishers, producing well-crafted topic maps could be a new way of leveraging their existing knowledge and experience and combating the threat to their existence posed by the vast amounts of information now available for free." [Curiouser and curiouser!]

Word 11, XML, and the universal canvas. "The endgame is what Microsoft has called the universal canvas. In the long run, that means migrating software to a common storage model. That won't happen any time soon, but there's a big near-term opportunity to leverage XML as an exchange format much more aggressively. I'd like to see that happen across the suite of Microsoft's clients by the time Office 11 ships. I'm not holding my breath, though." [Jon's Radio] Me neither. Although I'd like it to happen across many different apps and clients.

Eric van der Vlist: Cataloging XML Vocabularies. "I've been involved recently in many discussions and projects oriented around a simple and common question: "how do I create an XML vocabulary?" The formulation was often different -- "how do I create a namespace?" or "how do I publish an XML schema?" -- but the central issue was always about what infrastructure to create and which methods should be used to advertise the newly created vocabulary."

Michael Gorman: And where do XML tags come from? "Which is the better source for XML Tags, an IT System Centric or Data Centric Approach?" [Column Two]

ActiveState just released the beta of Visual XSLT 1.5. It's got a couple of neat new features like support for .NET extension objects and an XPath expression evaluator. Sign up for the beta here. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]

Jon Udell: Web services security and XML pixie dust. "Are we just trying to XMLize Kerberos and PKI and ACLs because we hope the magic pixie dust of XML will make the pain go away?"

webservice.org: Why doesn't EDi just die already? "Web services will have a tougher job convincing businesses to switch from EDI, because of their relative novelty, but you see the pieces starting to come together to prove their stability, reliability, and staying power. ...Both Web services and ebXML can offer businesses something EDI cannot, and that's flexibility. EDI transactions generally work from implementation guidelines that specify fixed message formats. That works fine, as long as you keep within your supply chain and have stable content. But business today does not always have that kind of predictability, and EDI transactions has been found difficult to map from one industry to another, and even between different segments of the same industry."

Don Box: XML & Inclusion. "XML Schema imposes a type system over XML Infosets that is very similar to the OO type systems you are familiar with. This makes XML Schemas well-suited for importing directly into Java or C# programs. Unfortunately, the XML Schema type system has features that don't make sense if your world doesn't revolve around named user-defined types (e.g., several script languages, SQL, etc.). For that reason, some members of the XML community has been lobbying for something with a looser type model than XML Schemas. Had the XML Schema working group made it clearer how to do this sort of thing with XML Schemas, I believe the time for adoption would be that much shorter." [sellsbrothers.com]

XML Protocol Working Group: last call announcement for review of the SOAP Version 1.2 specification. SOAP Version 1.2 Usage Scenarios. Interesting.

Patric Logan: Loose Coupling. "Loose coupling is not goodness in and of itself. There is a goal. In an enterprise information system the goal is to provide the information the enterprise wants, when it wants it. That has a cost. Loose coupling can support the cost of change when the enterprise does not have what it wants." [Loosely Coupled]