New Directories Put UDDI on the Shelf

Creating applications such as Gaglione’s will be the key to making UDDI use widespread, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, an analysis firm that specializes in Web services. Bloomberg said he believes that although the specification isn’t widely used now, using the directory could lead to widespread creation of service-oriented architectures.

“What we like to say is that UDDI is the ugly duckling of the core Web services standards,” he said. “Remember what happened with the ugly duckling? He turned out to be more beautiful than the others. UDDI can lead to dynamic discovery of services. In order to build an SOA, you have to build loosely coupled services.”

Many of these services may change and move, he said. So UDDI could facilitate this architecture by dynamically locating resources instead of requiring developers to hard-code their changing locations, he said.

“Instead you say, ‘Whenever I need this service, I’m going to look it up,’” he said.

Read more at: SD Times

XML Database Options

IBM’s DB2, Oracle Corp.’s Oracle9i, Microsoft Corp.’s SQL Server and Sybase Inc.’s Sybase all offer some XML enablement for their relational databases, says analyst Ron Schmelzer at ZapThink, and all four are moving toward native XML support. As they do, they will compete with Software AG’s Tamino, which he calls the leading native XML database.

Read more at: ComputerWorld

XML Gets Organized

Until they develop native XML support, major database vendors offer translation layers that either “shred” the XML document into small enough components to store in the fields of a relational database, or “cram” the entire XML document into a single field, according to Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, a market research firm in Waltham, Mass.

Eventually, Schmelzer says, all major database vendors will offer native XML support. But to be truly native, the database must be able to take any arbitrary XML document and insert it into the data store without any modification and then retrieve that document without shredding, jamming or otherwise modifying it, he says. “Can it handle arbitrary variables in the XML documents, like lots of repeated tags and lots of levels of hierarchy?” Schmelzer asks. Another key feature is support for still-emerging standards such as XQuery.

Read more at: ComputerWorld

XML in the Content Lifecycle

The process of creating content — information meant for human consumption — is almost always extremely effort-intensive. People must spend time organizing information prior to creation, constructing the content, and laying out the information so that it is easily read. With so much time, cost, and effort invested in content, it makes sense to reduce costs by reusing content as much as possible. Furthermore, content-oriented processes involve a complex set of interactions that progress in a “Content Lifecycle” consisting of five major stages: content creation, management, publishing, syndication, and protection. Each of these phases requires different technologies, processes, and resources.

By rearchitecting content representation technologies to treat content as another asset in the corporate IT infrastructure, businesses can realize the benefits long promised to us by reusable and agile content. But first, we need to move from ad-hoc content creation to content componentization, and then to content services. XML and Web Services are the key to this transition that can help organizations maximize the value of their content.

XML Data Store Multi-Client Study

While much has been written about XML data storage, none of the research to date has focused on the key questions:

• What are the different needs for XML data storage?
• ow do those needs translate into different storage requirements?
• How are various vendor solutions best suited to meet these different needs?

In attempting to understand the answers to the above questions, ZapThink realized that there was no single answer for any of these key questions. In fact, it seems that the various requirements for XML data storage pull end-user customers in different directions when they are deciding how to implement XML storage requirements. As such, this study seeks to do what no other study before it has done: show that XML data storage is not a distinct market segment, but instead a functionality requirement for applications that require XML storage in order to achieve their overall system objectives.

ZapThink: Native XML Data Storage Will Evolve

nalysts at XML and Web services consultancy ZapThink Friday made the prediction that the native XML database (NXD) niche no longer exists as a separate market.

ZapThink Senior Analyst Ron Schmelzer told internetnews.com XML-enabled relational database (RDBMS), content management, and integration vendors are best suited to offer general-purpose XML data store solutions, while XML database pure-plays are offering more focused XML data storage solutions. Schmelzer believes XML database features will eventually become incorporated in an increasing number of major software packages, including those offered by Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.

Read more at: Internetnews.com

XML in the Content Lifecycle

The process of creating content — information meant for human consumption — is almost always extremely effort-intensive. People must spend time organizing information prior to creation, constructing the content, and laying out the information so that it is easily read. With so much time, cost, and effort invested in content, it makes sense to reduce costs by reusing content as much as possible. Furthermore, content-oriented processes involve a complex set of interactions that progress in a “Content Lifecycle” consisting of five major stages: content creation, management, publishing, syndication, and protection. Each of these phases requires different technologies, processes, and resources.

By rearchitecting content representation technologies to treat content as another asset in the corporate IT infrastructure, businesses can realize the benefits long promised to us by reusable and agile content. But first, we need to move from ad-hoc content creation to content componentization, and then to content services. XML and Web Services are the key to this transition that can help organizations maximize the value of their content.

ZapNote: B-Bop

The only true solutions for enterprise-wide XML data storage and retrieval are XML-enabled RDBMS and Native XML Data Store (NXD) approaches. The challenge with XML-enabled RDBMS is that they are not very well suited to highly extensible and flexible documents, while the challenge with NXDs is that they are unproven technologies with very small user bases. However, there is another option that is a sort of "middle ground": the use of an interpretive middle layer over standard RDBMS systems that offers schema-independent, "native" XML data storage. In this vein, B-Bop offers their Xfinity Server as a way of providing the features of Native XML storage while utilizing existing relational storage architectures.

ZapNote: X-Hive

The most valuable attribute of Native XML Data Stores (NXDs) is their ability to store arbitrary and highly variant XML documents. XML-enabled RDBMS systems require explicit mappings to XML documents, and by their very nature are unable to deal with XML documents that have a highly variable structure and take advantage of XML’s extensibility capabilities. X-Hive provides a solution to this problem by presenting a highly scalable NXD system that is capable of supporting a large quantity and volume of XML documents. X-Hive/DB is differentiated itself by its focus on high volume XML data storage requirements, support for advanced XML query and storage specifications, and focused support of its European customer base.

ZapNote: Ipedo

Ipedo has developed a proprietary, hierarchical, in-memory database engine aimed at storing XML documents "natively". The Ipedo XML Database uses memory techniques to get substantial performance gains versus some other NXD approaches. Built as an all-Java server, the Ipedo system is meant to be easily integrated with typical application server environments. Ipedo has extended XPath for search across multiple XML documents and has also included XSLT transformations within the data store itself.