Telematique, water and fire.

Open SOA Collaboration ... is this the key?

Some heavy hitters, as well as pureplay SOA companies, have put a firm schedule in place for the hand over of some important specifications to Oasis.  The question is, will this be in time to make a difference to the adoption of WS-* in business-to-business SOA?

IT vendors hand over SOA specs to Oasis | InfoWorld | News | 2007-03-21 | By China Martens, IDG News Service

... One of the issues users are encountering as they adopt the SOA approach to developing reusable software and services is the lack of standards between different vendors' SOA software, making integration of third-party products difficult.

Members of the Open SOA Collaboration announced Wednesday that they will hand over their jointly developed SCA (Service Component Architecture) and non-Java C++ SDO (Service Data Objects) specifications to the Oasis standards body for further development. They will turn over their Java SDO specification work to the JCP (Java Community Process), the group that sets Java standards. The Java SDO work originated in JCP in 2003.

SCA focuses on defining models to create and assemble service components to build SOAs, while SDO aims to provide a consistent method for data handling within SOA applications.

The SCA specifications include full support for BPEL (business process execution language), the Spring Java development framework, Java, and C++. The specifications also include an assembly model describing how SOA components interact with each other so that the developers, assemblers, and deployers of individual components can deal with a consistent model, according to Michael Bechauf, vice president of industry standards at SAP AG. ...

Technorati Tags: Oasis, SCA, SDO, SOA

FCC: No Cellphone Use in Airplanes

For whatever reason -- social or technical -- thank you for putting this idea to sleep.

Chief Says F.C.C. Is Against Cellphone Use on Airliners - New York Times

The Federal Communications Commission will give up on the idea of allowing cellphone use on airplanes, the chairman said on Thursday, because it is not clear whether the network on the ground can handle the calls. ...

Technorati Tags: FCC, FAA

Service Modeling Language (SML) Shows Up to the Party

I've clearly been focused elsewhere.  This is a potentially a "big thing" in serving up next generation data center management.   I'd definitely like to understand more about this, and will be looking for sources -- the usual suspects and new voices -- to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

New Standard Seeks To Allow Services To Talk To Each Other

A new standard that will allow services that have never shaken hands before to interoperate was submitted Thursday to the World Wide Web Consortium.

Service Modeling Language (SML) is almost guaranteed to be ratified as a new W3C standard because of the wide industry backing behind it. The proposed specification was drafted by IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Intel, Cisco Systems, CA, EMC, BEA Systems, and BMC.

Many of these contributors to the specification are likely to start incorporating SML into their systems and network management products before it's ratified as a standard, said Ed Anderson, director of the dynamic systems initiative at Microsoft.

"This is a critical step for us. SML will simplify the management of services generally," Anderson said in an interview. It's the first time such a broad industry coalition has gotten behind the same standard, he added. SML will supply a consistent way to describe networks, applications, servers and other computer resources in XML, the Extensible Markup Language already widely used for documents on the Web, said Wayne Adams, senior technologist with EMC, the storage and storage management vendor.

With XML-parsing already built into many networked systems, SML will fit into many existing infrastructures. An ability to describe system resources in XML will allow services to be built that will work with other SML-modeled services. SML will also help generate a hierarchy of IT resources from reuseable, SML-defined building blocks rather than requiring custom descriptions each time IT seeks to build a service. ...

Technorati Tags: SML, Service_Modeling_Language, XML

XIOS, the XML Operating System

Once you strip away the hyperbole -- the fear being struck into the corporate hearts of Microsoft, Google and Adobe -- this is an interesting article and a very interesting concept. I'm reminded a bit of the claims made for Java when it first gained attention ... ease of programming, safety because of the sandbox, portability. And yet, there might just be enough of a basis to this that it has a real impact.

Xcerion's Internet Cloud Forms Over Google and Microsoft - Technology News by InformationWeek

... For the past five years, Xcerion has been working on an XML-based Internet operating system (XIOS) that runs inside a Web browser. In a way, XIOS is an abstraction layer that sits atop a true operating system like Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows, just as does Transmedia's Flash-based Glide Next media sharing environment.

But XIOS aims to provide lower-level functionality. It's not simply an interface for media sharing. Rather, it's a complete XML-based operating system and development platform that replicates the desktop computing experience from inside the browser and adds the benefits of cloud-based computing, where applications and data are available over the network.

Watch it in action and you'll see a visual representation of the threat it poses to Windows: Double-click on the application and the familiar desktop interface appears inside the browser window. Expand the browser window in full-screen mode and the Windows desktop vanishes beneath it. Of course the XIOS environment could just as easily look like the Mac OS desktop or something else entirely. This is what Microsoft feared Netscape would do, turn its main asset, the operating system, into middleware.

There are several reasons why one might want to run an XML-based operating system in a Web browser: security, data portability, freedom from hardware and platform lock-in, cost, built-in collaboration, and development productivity.

While no computer system is completely secure, XIOS should be immune to most of the malware in circulation today because it runs in a sandbox, a virtual environment where code can be executed without risk to computing resources on the outside.

Because XIOS is based on XML, the operating system, the integrated development environment (IDE), the applications, and data files are extremely portable and compatible. Applications can be easily tied to back-end XML Web services created with .Net, Java, or other Web technology. With XIOS running in a Web browser, users can access their files from any computer with an Internet connection and compatible browser, regardless of platform. The Xcerion's operating system has to be downloaded, but it's a small file -- only 2 Mbytes. ...