Expressing SNMP SMI Datatypes in XML Schema Definition Language

Members of the IETF Operations and Management Area Working Group Working
Group have published a new Internet Draft in the online directories:
"Expressing SNMP SMI Datatypes in XML Schema Definition Language." The
memo defines the IETF standard expression of Simple Network Management
Protocol (SNMP) Structure of Management Information (SMI) datatypes in
Extensible Markup Language (XML) Schema Definition (XSD) language. The
primary objective of this memo is to enable production of XML documents
that are as faithful to the SMI as possible, using XSD as the validation
mechanism. This memo is the first in a set of three related and
(logically) ordered specifications: (1) SNMP SMI Datatypes (RFC 2578)
in XSD; (2) SNMP MIB Structure (RFC 2578) in XSD. (3) SNMP Textual
Conventions (RFC 2579) in XSD. As a set, these documents define the XSD
equivalent of SMIv2 to encourage XML-based protocols to carry, and
XML-based applications to use, the information modeled in the
SMIv2-compliant Management Information Base ("The MIB"). Various
independent schemes have been devised for expressing the SMI datatypes
and textual conventions in W3C Schema (XSD). These schemes have exhibited
a degree of commonality (especially concerning the numeric SMI datatypes),
but also sufficient differences (especially concerning the non-numeric
SMI datatypes) to preclude general interoperability. The primary purpose
of this memo is to define a standard expression of SMI datatypes in XSD
to ensure uniformity and general interoperability in this respect.
Internet operators, management tool developers, and users will benefit
from the wider selection of management tools and the greater degree of
unified management -- with attendant improvements in timeliness and
accuracy of management information -- which such a standard will
facilitate.

Relax-WS: Trying To Make WSDL Easier To Use?

As with many things concerning Web Services, there are vociferous
arguments for and against WSDL -- even before WSDL 2.0 poured oil on
the fires. One of the main arguments against WSDL is the verbosity and
complexity of what's involved in writing a WSDL for a service. However,
the Relax-WS project is attempting to provide a solution there. The
idea is to extend Relax-NG Compact Syntax by adding support for
services, ports, operations and messages. The project aims to encourage
developers to think about the WSDL from the start, as part of the
service contract and not as an afterthought. From the Google Code
project page 'relax-ws: A relaxing way to create web service
definitions': "WSDL is a key technology for SOA, and yet creating and
editing these files is about as much fun as straightening all the
noodles in a bowl of spaghetti with a pair of tweezers. Relax-ws
provides a simple, compact syntax for generating WSDL's. It does this
by extending RelaxNG Compact syntax with support for services, ports,
operations, and messages. Some teams use code-driven development,
whereby they write Java or C# interfaces and let their framework
generate the WSDL. This is fast for development, but can easily result
in platform-specific features sneaking in, which renders the interface
unusable for cross-platform clients. An even greater problem with
code-driven development is the evaporation of interface metadata that
occurs during translation into WSDL. Comments are not converted, nor
are any but the most simple type declarations (i.e., the length of an
'xsd:string' field, or the number of digits in a decimal field, etc).
These are important attributes for the consumer of the service to know
about. The opposite approach is WSDL-driven development. The programmer
begins with a WSDL file, and as part of the build generates the service
interface that is then implemented by one or more classes. The challenge
here lies in creating the WSDL! Relax-WS aims to provide a simple,
programmer-friendly syntax, without losing any of the metadata..."

New Draft for W3C Architectural Recommendation "The Self-Describing Web"

A new draft of the TAG Finding on "The Self-Describing Web" is now
available as an editor's draft. "Significant changes in this rewrite
include: (1) A major new section introduces and highlights the standard
HTTP-based retrieval "algorithm" that user agents employ to access
self-describing resource representations. (2) There is now extensive
discussion of URI-based extensibility, and of the ability of user agents
to dynamically acquire rules for interpreting new sorts of content by
retrieving OWL ontologies, namespace documents (RDDL), etc. Such dynamic
discovery using URIs is now to some degree a unifying theme for the
latter half of the finding. Examples are also given of using URIs as
the basis for extensible attribute values (e.g. link relationships) and
other similar data fields in Web representations. (3) The discussion of
RDF and RDFa has been updated and clarified and the section on GRDDL has
been added. (4) Numerous examples have been added." Document Abstract:
"The Web is designed to support flexible exploration of information, by
human users and by automated agents. For such exploration to be productive,
information published by many different sources and for a variety of
purposes must be comprehensible to a wide range of Web client software.
HTTP and other Web technologies can be used to deploy resources that
are self-describing, in the sense that only widely available information
is necessary for understanding them. Starting with a URI, there is a
standard algorithm that a user agent can apply to retrieve and interpret
a representation of such resources. Furthermore, when such self-describing
resources are linked together, the Web as a whole can support reliable,
ad hoc discovery of information. This finding describes how document
formats, markup conventions, attribute values, and other data formats
can be designed to facilitate the deployment of self-describing Web
content."

XML at X; Film at XI

The original XML Recommendation is 10 years old today. Happy XML Day!
These anniversaries feel a little artificial to me; my first clear
memory of the XML work was a teleconference Jon Bosak had arranged among
the "SGML on the Web Editorial Review Board" members in June (?) 1996,
so for me XML is twelve and a half years old. As something of a birthday
present, today I'm publishing something SGML-flavored that I hope may
still be of use, or at least morbid interest, to modern XML
practitioners. You see, I cowrote a book in the just-prior-to-XML era
with another of my lifelong friends, Jeanne El Andaloussi, about SGML,
in SGML. In DocBook, as a matter of fact. That methodology I mentioned
above, with design principles and stuff? That came from this book. Now
that the book is out of print, she and I discussed the matter, and we
agreed to publish it here... You'll have to be the judge of how well
the content has stood the test of time, but I can tell you the markup
did beautifully. With a huge dollop of help from Norm Walsh (both his
DocBook stylesheets and his mad skillz), the SGML-to-XML-to-HTML
processing pipeline was downright trivial. Voila! We present to you
(online): "Developing SGML DTDs: From Text to Model to Markup." More Information See also the classic e-book: CLICK HERE

New OASIS Standard: XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) v1.2

OASIS has announced the approval of the XML Localization Interchange
File Format (XLIFF) specification Version 1.2 as an OASIS Standard. The
specification was produced by members of the OASIS XML Localisation
Interchange File Format (XLIFF) Technical Committee. The purpose of the
XLIFF vocabulary is to store localizable data and carry it from one step
of the localization process to the other, while allowing interoperability
between tools. The specification is tool-neutral, supports the entire
localization process, and supports common software, document data formats,
and markup languages. The specification provides an extensibility
mechanism to allow the development of tools compatible with an
implementer's data formats and workflow requirements. The extensibility
mechanism provides controlled inclusion of information not defined in
the specification. The XLIFF file format serves as a container for
externalized data to be interchanged between software publishers,
documentation writers (including, but not limited to documents written
in DITA, Docbook, HTML, and other XML document formats), localization
tools, and software services providers in order to facilitate all the
phases of the localization process. More Information

The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends

Speaking at this week's Gartner BPM Summit in Las Vegas, Jay Simons,
VP of Marketing for BEA, presented the company's recent research results
on the state of the BPM market, including a survey of 200-plus BEA
customers, mostly IT people but spread across vertical markets and
geographies. They've also gathered information through their online BPM
Lifecycle Assessment. The results show a number of interesting trends
indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their
processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their
ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI over the
next three years. (1) IT embraces BPM enterprisewide, which broadens the
scope for BPM beyond the existing departmental systems, and centralizes
the practices around BPM. In general, this is occurring because of the
ability of BPM to connect applications into improved business processes;
more than half already are or will be connecting BPM and SOA in their
environment. (2) BPM is becoming event-driven, in order to support the
event-driven nature of business today. This will result in much more
agile processes that can respond to both expected and unexpected events.
(3) Increased focus on knowledge-intensive processes, and using
collaborative BPM to enable ad hoc processes both on their own or as an
offshoot from a structured process... (4) Enterprise social computing:
introducing tagging, wiki, social connectedness and the like with more
traditional process management in order to add context and more easily
collaborate. (5) Moving towards dynamic business applications; Yvonne
Genovese spoke in this keynote about the move towards dynamic/composite
applications in order to free organizations from the pre-canned logic
in packaged enterprise applications, but BPM, together with services
exposed in an SOA layer, allows for the fast assembly of applications
that are more suited to current business needs.

W3C's Excessive DTD Traffic

If you view the source code of a typical web page, you are likely to
see something like this near the top: These
[statements] refer to HTML DTDs and namespace documents hosted on W3C's
site. Note that these are not hyperlinks; these URIs are used for
identification. This is a machine-readable way to say "this is HTML".
In particular, software does not usually need to fetch these resources,
and certainly does not need to fetch the same one over and over! Yet we
receive a surprisingly large number of requests for such resources: up
to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth
usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven't changed in years. The vast
majority of these requests are from systems that are processing various
types of markup (HTML, XML, XSLT, SVG) and in the process doing something
like validating against a DTD or schema. Handling all these requests
costs us considerably: servers, bandwidth and human time spent analyzing
traffic patterns and devising methods to limit or block excessive new
request patterns. We would much rather use these assets elsewhere, for
example improving the software and services needed by W3C and the Web
Community. You might think something like "don't request the same
resource thousands of times a day, especially when it explicitly tells
you it should be considered fresh for 90 days" would be obvious, but
unfortunately it seems not. At the W3C Systems Team's request the W3C
TAG has agreed to take up the issue of "Scalability of URI Access to
Resources."