Straight talk for health records

Ontologies let organizations agree on the framework to allow machines to understand one another, rather than on specific definitions of data elements, said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink, a Baltimore, Md.-based technology research organization.

“So when I say ‘gender,’ I mean something that applies to a person, not to a company,” he explained.

Read more at: Government Health IT

XForms meets Ajax: Can they get along?

“These two are very different technologies,” explains Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. “Ajax is focused on the presentation and interaction with users across an asychronous set of interactions. XForms is focused solely on the issue of representing data collection and exchange between clients and servers.”

And according to the analyst they can and hopefully will work together.

“For sure, people are leveraging Ajax to do XForms-like things,” he said, “but I see a better world where Ajax is XForms-enabled. Since, Ajax is not a standard, but rather a collection of different UI operations. XForms, on the other hand, is a standard. It represents how form-based information is represented, collected and exchanged. For developers to use XForms as the standard and Ajax as the implementation / representation makes a lot more sense than either one replacing the other.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

W3C addresses Web services bandwidth

”We’re definitely seeing a pick-up in interest across the board about making the highly useful but highly inefficient XML language better,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, in an e-mail. “While there are a number of products on the market to solve these challenges, new specs and more optimized renderings of XML are better for the whole industry.”

Although XOP doesn’t specifically talk about packaging XML as a binary format, it does involve extending XML to support large binary media types, which serves as an indication of the prevalence in which XML is being used for new applications outside the bounds originally conceived of for the language, Schmelzer added.

“MTOM and RRSHB also substantially help to improve efficiency by cutting down on the traffic that SOAP messages can potentially create through a combination of optimization of the message itself, and by introducing caching into the mix. Why ask for data if you already have it?” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Binary XML is fast in theory but may be slow in adoption

There are many issues to consider in studying how workable binary XML might be in business applications, according to Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, the analyst firm specializing in XML standards and applications.

In a report on the issue, “Will Binary XML Solve XML Performance Woes?” he notes that because XML is designed to be read both by machines and humans, it results in “message sizes that can easily be 10 to 50 times larger than equivalent messages sent via binary encodings.”

“To make matters worse,” Schmelzer writes, “conducting a simple point-to-point exchange between XML conversant endpoints might require each of the following operations: decryption, validation, parsing, marshalling, serialization, canonicalization, document signing, and encryption.”

Binary XML would speed this processing up and is cleaner than the alternative approach of compressing the XML text into a zip file, which has the downside of adding a processing step—zipping and unzipping—at each end of any communication, he notes.

That said, the ZapThink analyst does not see binary XML as the mythological silver bullet. The main downside is that every point in an XML process would have to be set up to handle the binary format, according to the analyst. While this might seem like a simple requirement, it may not be.

“While proponents often talk about how endpoints can easily be configured to deal with binary XML,” Schmelzer writes, “they often neglect the fact that intermediaries between the communicating parties often must be able to inspect and make decisions on that traffic. As a result, binary XML’s global acceptance hinges upon all security, process, management, and transformation systems or devices being able to understand and process the binary XML format.”

The issue of proprietary formats also raises its ugly head.

“Furthermore,” the ZapThink analyst writes, “binary XML raises the specter of potential compatibility and vendor lock-in concerns. For example, the format chosen to represent numerical data, such as integers, floating point numbers, or arrays, must be platform independent, so that different consuming platforms are able to take advantage of the performance boost that such native formatting offers—a tall order in today’s complex, heterogeneous IT environment.”

Read more at: Application Development Trends

XML: the answer to everything?

Is this the answer to everything? Well, in the publishing world the answer is sometimes “no”, because affordable publishing can sometimes be accomplished without the help of XML – XML would be overkill. However, XML often is the best option for organizations that take the time to evaluate their content lifecycle and to examine how much it costs to create, maintain, translate, deliver, store, reuse, archive, and retire content. A recent study by ZapThink (“XML in the Content Lifecycle Foundation Report Creating, Managing, Publishing, Syndicating, and Protecting Content with XML”) found that the biggest – and most expensive – challenge for most organizations today is content reuse. The study found that “Producers of content in the enterprise spend over 60% of their time locating, formatting, and structuring content and just 40% of their time actually creating it.” (Source: ZapThink)

Read more at: Free Software Magazine

Companies Team on Web Services Transaction Spec

The trinity of specs share some things in common with previously announced specs such as ebXML (define) and certainly rubs shoulders with the WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction schemas from Microsoft, IBM and others. How are they different?

ZapThink Senior Analyst Ronald Schmelzer said WS-CAF is focused on the B2B-oriented transactions, which is a more focused and specific problem than the more general reliable, transacted processes solved by the WS-Transaction and WS-Coordination specs.

Schmelzer and his colleague, ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg, called this issue another case of vendors chopping up a particular problem into small pieces.

“In essence, this is a “divide-and-conquer” strategy,” Schmelzer told internetnews.com. “By dividing up a much larger, more significant problem area into more minute problem areas, these vendors (that are struggling to become Web Services leaders) are hoping to sway users into particular implementations that use their specs, which of course, IBM and Microsoft will simply not support.”

Read more at: InternetNews

Standards Competition: A Good Thing?

A few weeks ago, the Liberty Alliance released their business requirements and guidelines for wide scale identity federation. At around the same time, the IBM and Microsoft-led consortium charged with developing the WS-Security roadmap of specifications released the first public version of their WS-Federation specification, which aims to enable federation …

Is Adobe Targeting Microsoft’s InfoPath?

Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst with XML research firm ZapThink said he feels organizations may find that InfoPath and Adobe’s eventual offering may be complementary.

“Adobe and Microsoft, while going after similar users (the non-technical ‘information worker’) are really solving different problems and coming at it from two different approaches — each leveraging their own strengths,” Schmelzer said. “Adobe’s product is aimed at the universe of people who are trying to automate the process of filling in forms that must then be submitted to some automated, electronic process. This document-automation, workflow-oriented bent is clearly illustrated in their desire for the forms to look and act like traditional PDF forms (or even paper-based forms) while having advanced functionality that is primarily hidden from the user who is filling out the form. In essence, Adobe is trying to smarten-up the forms submission and human workflow-oriented processes without having to re-educate the user.

Read more at: InternetNews

Rivalry bogs down Web services

With the software industry betting on Web services standards as the basis for many software systems, customers can expect a continuation of the high-stakes politics and battles among computing providers, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at research firm ZapThink.
“There’s going to be a lot more of this (conflict) as problems get more complex,” Schmelzer said. “As specifications take on more complicated issues like security, business process (automation) and service levels, they become competitive differentiation for products.”

Read more at: CNet

W3C Cleans Up SOAP Standard

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass., said he thinks it will take a year or two for SOAP 1.2 to work its way into products. In the meantime, “vendors and end users are going to be annoyed at times at the fact that there are two [versions of SOAP],” he said. But he added that work is ongoing in the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organization to create profiles on how to use standards such as SOAP.

Read more at: ComputerWorld