DataDirect announced the latest release of its DataDirect XQuery engine now supporting the MySQL Enterprise Server database. For the first time, users of the most popular and widely used open-source database can take advantage of the high-performance, scalability and reliability of DataDirect XQuery to access data stored in relational databases as XML. In addition to the MySQL Enterprise Server, DataDirect XQuery can be used with leading relational databases, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) applications and can handle the processing of large-scale XML documents.

Managed Methods has announced the availability of their SOA management and runtime governance product JaxView 3.7. While providing full support for SOA and Web service management for the IT operations, JaxView 3.7 expanded runtime policy enforcement features around the creation of Service Policy Profiles.

StrikeIron announced two new Financial and Business data services from Gale, part of Cengage Learning, have been added to its expanding Web Services Marketplace: Gale Business Intelligence Web Service 1.0.0 and Gale Business Information Web Service 1.0.0.

Every major enterprise technology vendor has developed its own SOA strategy, supported by innumerable mid-size companies and start-ups offering specific SOA aspects or entire solutions. Submit your speaking proposal today to discuss your SOA strategy at SOA World Conference & Expo on June 23-24, 2008, in New York City. Tracks will include Web 2.0/AJAX and SOA, Interop Standards and Services, Real-World SOA, SOA Technology, Virtualization, and Specially Selected Hot Topics.

A7Soft has made a significant step in development XML related Java application. Releasing JExamXML, A7Soft transferred XML comparison technologies from the Windows application ExamXML to the industry standard Java platform, allowing mullions of XML developers to embed the XML differencing technologies into their application.

Is JSON better than XForms? That's an apples and oranges argument. I am willing to predict that XForms + XQuery will become a powerful enterprise model for rich form content, because the enterprise is considerably more XML-centric than the consumer stack is. I'm willing to predict that JSON feeds to most mashups will likely end up being a mix of XML (primarily via feeds) and JSON for quite some time, though I'm inclined to suspect that AtomPub will likely tilt the balance of power towards XML in the long run.

A more interesting question is 'Is XML on the web trending up or trending down?' Clearly, it is trending down. For data transfer applications, XML is losing ground to JSON because JSON is simply a better data transfer format. And XHTML has failed to displace HTML in the marketplace. The benefit of clientside validation has proven to not be a benefit. I think you can argue, and in fact I did argue, that because of W3C's adventures with XML, the web itself may not have a future. The browser has a lot of problems, the worst of which are the security problems that came with Netscape Navigator 2. That was 12 years ago, and there has been no progress since that time in fixing the fundamental problems. There have been lots of patches on top of patches. Nothing more.

Google's new-year special logo, which went live briefly as 2008 began, celebrated the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP - adopted by Arpanet on January 1st, 1983. While 'invisible' to most users, many of the layers built on top of TCP/IP are well-known even to laymen: HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), FTP (the File Transfer Protocol), SMTP and POP3, and IRC.

Tail-f Systems and IP Infusion announced a strategic partnership to integrate their products and collaborate on sales and marketing. Together the companies will enable network equipment providers to benefit from leading routing protocols managed by standards-based XML configuration management software.

Roughly two years ago, when I was writing an article on 'New Features for Device Developers in Visual Studio 2005' that was published in the August 2005 issues of this magazine, our program management team was already busy shaping the next release of the product, which is soon to be released as Visual Studio 2008. We spent a lot of time talking to our major customers and reviewing the feedback we got on blogs and questions on forums on newsgroups to identify what enhancements/features would be most useful to our device developers. One thing that surfaced was that device developers needed more help when it came to testing their applications efficiently. Whether that meant testing on multiple devices or under varying conditions or simply being able to write unit tests, they clearly needed help getting applications to market faster by reducing the testing time.

DataDirect Technologies announced the latest release of its DataDirect XML Converters and DataDirect XQuery products. With version 3.1 of its XML products, it offers even greater scalability and performance; broadens its support of popular databases and industry standards; and offers a highly scalable streaming architecture to exceed the most demanding data integration and enterprise system requirements.

Altova announced that Altova XMLSpy was named as winner of the 'Best of Connections 2007' in the Office category by Penton Media's Windows IT Pro. In the award?s first year, the judges reviewed over 60 IT products and services submitted for the contest and chose 18 finalists that were evaluated at Microsoft Connections in Las Vegas. Interviews were conducted, and winners were announced on the exhibit floor of the Connections conference.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

AltovaXML, a free XML standards processor, was named 'Best XML Parser' and 'Best XSLT Processor' in the 2007 SOA World Magazine Readers' Choice Awards. XMLSpy, an XML editor and development environment for modeling, editing, transforming, and debugging XML-related technologies, won four awards in 2007.

For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions of applications. For deployment, BundleWorks supports local and remote deployment and provides a library of functions to handle common deployment tasks. For maintentance, BundleWorks tracks all bundle actions and configuration changes providing a complete history of activity.

So, failing Nigeria, the first 300,000 AMD-based XOs are in production and some of them are bound for Rwanda, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti and Mongolia. The rest are bound for upscale American homes under OLPC's $399 Give One, Get One scheme, which started November 12 and was only supposed to run for two weeks but has been extended to December 31. Oh, yes, and Intel is giving 3,000 of its competing Classmates to Nigeria.

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

JustSystems, Inc. will promote XML?s evolving role at the XML 2007 Conference & Exposition, being held in Boston at the Marriott Copley Place on Dec. 3 ? 5, 2007. ?XML has grown up, with companies accelerating their XML adoption to support SOA and winding up with an abundance of highly-accessible information,? explained Jake Sorofman, vice president of marketing for JustSystems. ?All of a sudden, XML isn?t just about interoperability between disparate applications. It?s about making business-critical information available to executives, knowledge workers, and others who need it.?

OASIS has formed a new technical committee to advance the Service Data Objects specification, which is designed to simplify the way in which service-oriented architecture applications handle data. Using SDO, application programmers can uniformly access and manipulate data from heterogeneous data sources, including relational databases, XML data sources, Web services, and enterprise information systems.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

BEA's Deputy CTO Theo Beack, who joined the San Jose, CA-based company in May to do 'all the cool stuff,' according to an exclusive interview with SYS-CON at the time, shared with delegates at SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 in San Francisco today his current thinking about Web 2.0, SOA, and Virtualization technologies, and how all three fit within BEA's evolving 'blended' application strategy.

Collaborative Software, the company start-up by ex-Open Source Development Labs CEO Stuart Cohen, has licensed the Shared Assessment Programs created by BITS, the consortium of US financial houses intending to use it to create an open source program that makes vendor data more readily available through a Web Services front-end app for collecting and editing shared assessment submissions as well as an XML schema for validating them as XML documents. It's a compliance thing.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Hans Reiser, the Linux file system creator on trial in California for the alleged murder of his missing wife, is proving to be a handful for his own lawyer William DuBois. Having reportedly memorized the 9,000 pages of discovery, Reiser has been second-guessing everything the lawyer says in court and interrupting to the point DuBois has complained to the trial judge, according to Wired, which is doing gavel-to-gavel coverage. The book heard DuBois tell a bailiff if Reiser was kicked out of court things would be a lot better.

Complex Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) based SOA environments pose a whole new level of management challenges. This session will explore the nature of those challenges by illustrating the need for a Complex Even Processor (CEP) to proactively manage your ESB.

In this joint session, Synovus and Active Endpoints will explain how reusing proven code to build new applications, regardless of that code's origin, allowed the community bank to provide customers with Web self-service options and other technology benefits usually considered beyond the reach of a smaller institution. By making the most of its programming resources, the bank was able to deliver Web services in line with customers' elevated expectations while keeping its focus on the personal service customers expect from a community bank. Attendees will learn about a successful strategy for building applications with loosely coupled components using ActiveBPEL, follow Synovus' considerations as the institution pursued its SOA strategy and discover the lessons learned along the way.

Many organizations make the faulty assumption that SOA is a panacea that can and should be applied to every situation. The reality is that service orientation is not the right answer for every scenario. The expense of service orientation cannot always be recouped and in some cases service orientation can actually do more harm than good. In this talk, Kyle Gabhart will explore the subject of selective service orientation and how to go about effectively governing the service orientation of the enterprise.

My own personal install of Leopard seems to be having periodic trouble completing a shutdown on the 17' MBP. Annoying? Yes. Worthy of posting something inflammatory such as 'wrong with Leopard's spots'? Doubtful. So, in looking at eWeek's Microsoft Watch's latest article, I leave you with this parting thought: If it walks like a shill, acts like a shill, and smells like a shill....

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been discussed as an important architectural style for the last few years. Organizations have started to develop service-oriented solutions and many are now leveraging services in their production environments. SOA introduces new technical complexities and challenges and makes testing a critical component of the development lifecycle.

One of the Google folks working on OpenSocial sent me a message via Facebook asking what I thought about the technical details of the recent announcements. Since my day job is working on social networking platforms for Web properties at Microsoft and I'm deeply interested in RESTful protocols, this is something I definitely have some thoughts about. Below is what started off as a private message but ended up being long enough to be its own article.

Since its emergence, Web Service technology has gone a long way towards perfecting itself and finding its right application in the real world. With the maturity of the specifications, Web Service technology, with its power of interoperability, is now the major enabling technology of SOA, which is being adopted by more and more enterprises to build their application integration infrastructure.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

Leopard introduces a bunch of amazingly powerful new controls, but one of my favorite new controls is the NSCollectionView. This control works a lot like the FlowLayoutPanel if you're familiar with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It essentially is a layout container responsible for laying out a collection of subviews. You can either manually create the subview collection, or you can set the content array of the NSCollectionView. This is a really powerful option because if you can set the content array, you can also bind it. For this demo, I've bound the content array of the NSCollectionView to an array controller. If you follow along (or if you cheat and just download the code), you'll notice that the NSCollectionView subviews automatically request Core Animation layers. This means that, by default, new items fade in as they are added, but you can change that transition using the animations tab of the inspector.

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks like to read - and not only programming books. Most of us read incessantly. Whether it's popular science, sci-fi or fantasy, a good thriller or an occasional popular history book or biography, it's a rare geek who isn't in love with books. And I am no exception, although I have to confess I am rather an extreme case since my love of books and eclectic tastes borders on the 'gentle madness' aka bibliomania.

It seems that ABC's 20/20 is going to do a piece on Linux file system programmer Hans Reiser and the murder case against him on Friday, November 2 and that that's one of the reasons the opening statements in his trial have been pushed back from Monday October 29 to Monday November 5. Concern about prejudicial information. Other reasons appear to be the number of pre-trial motions and the difficulty the defense has had in getting the reportedly 400-page file on the custody case over Reiser's two little kids out of Juvenile Court. His lawyer finally got it after the murder trial judge intervened.

Liquid XML Studio is a free graphical XSD Editor & XML Editor that can also be used to edit WSDL and other XML based standards. It has a simple intuitive interface that makes developing for the complex W3C XML Schema (XSD) standard quick and easy. A validator is provided that strictly adheres to the W3C standard ensuring that the XML Schemas you produce are valid and correct.

'Our 'pals' at SYS-CON have done it again. Just when I thought they had displayed the utmost in immaturity and unprofessionalism, they manage to make even bigger fools of themselves. And no, I am not going to link to specific posts or pages, and I ask that comments refrain from the same - considering that all they have nowadays are measly ads, I do not want to in any way contribute to their ad revenue. Suffice it to say that the more we see of SYS-CON's petty antics, the more our decision to cut their funding makes sense. Of course, that is what has triggered this recent outbreak of logorrhoea, and judging by their meaningless drivel I can only assume that the few employees who were not wise enough to jump ship are feeling somewhat desperate. And so, perhaps a moment of silence is in order for the fallen SYS-CON. Or ... nah, what the heck, a toast is more appropriate. Cheers!'

DigitalPersona, the biometrics authentication folk, has moved its One Touch SDK to Linux so developers can create fingerprint-enabled Linux applications. It figures it would be good for embedded Linux platforms and standalone systems in retail, finance, healthcare and time and attendance applications. The widgetry is initially designated for 2.6 versions of SUSE and Slackware and developers can use C and C++ environments to integrate it into code that will run on PCs, servers, POS terminal or embedded devices.

I will be attending the Ajax World Conference next week in Santa Clara. I will also be at the opening reception on Monday and the conference party on Tuesday. Over the weekend Jesse Liberty blogged about this as well 'If you are going to be at AJAXWorld, look for me on Twitter, and let's see if we can set up a meeting or a lunch.' Other faculty members, according to the Ajax World website, who will be at these parties include...

While these experts differ on issues like the importance of SOA ROI, how to calculate SOA ROI (if at all), and why we don't have more/better of it, they all seem to agree on one thing: 'Enterprise-wide support for SOA hinges on the ability to demonstrate value to the business at large - more growth, revenue opportunities, and all that good stuff.' (Joe's words, not mine.) And that's where your job is at stake. Or, at least, the long-term support of your SOA efforts.