PROGRAMMING Standardization Finally Into
Proof–Of–Concept
A lot of research has gone into determining the technical basis for standardizing
the global implementation of XML. Called ebXML, this
initiative was undertaken by UN/CEFACT and OASIS
back in 1999 and hopes to ensure that XML is used in a consistent manner
for electronic business data exchange. UN/CEFACT is the United Nations
body who oversees worldwide policy and technical developing in trade facilitation
and eBiz and develops and promotes tools for such, including the international
EDI standard. OASIS is an international, non–profit consortium for
advancing eBiz through open, collaborative development of interoperability
specs and is the home for industry groups who are interested in developing
XML specs. There will be a demo of ebXML at the XML DevCon
in New York on April 10th, with vendors from around the world participating.
Simulations of a global, eBiz trading network using publicly available
ebXML, with the hoped for result of establishing proof of stability for
the specs. Final ratification is expected in May of this year. Learn more
at: OASIS,
the ebXML site, or at UN/CEFACT.
PROGRAMMING XML One Step Further
SoftQuad’s Sharp XMetaL SoftQuad Software has taken
XML technologies one step further with SoftQuad XMetaL
2.1 which provides transparent Unicode–conformant
editing and display capabilities to XML content creation. Here developers
can design intuitive interfaces that enable anyone to create and work
with XML content directly without having to pay for document conversion.
In addition, businesses can now develop XMetaL authoring applications
that enable you to easily create XML content in any left–to–right
language.
NETWORKS Optimization Is The Key
If you are developing for OC–192 and OC–768 optical Internet
infrastructure systems, listen up. Internet Machines Corp.
has just released their SDK for such work, a suite of software development
tools for the company's network processor. This SDK enables developers
to rapidly evaluate the processor and then customize their product designs
early in the development cycle. Such can drastically reduce time to market.
You can run simulations, analyze performance, and get into code debugging
for full optimization of the network processor. More
info.
SEMICONDUCTORS Sound Silicon From 3DSP
A world of opportunity exists within nextgen Internet appliances, audio
players, set-tops and automotive audio set-ups... especially for scalable
and configurable DSP (digital signal processor) architectures. Enter 3DSP
Corp. who have released their 3DSP Audio Software Suite.
This offering should speed system–on–chip (SoC) development
of 16–bit digital audio subsystems tat are based on the company’s
SP–3 and/or their SP–5 DSP cores with the DSP–Shuttle Bus
Controller. Included are extended instructions designed specifically for
audio apps so that a companion microprocessor or microcontroller are no
longer needed. Additionally, the target silicon chip is reduced in size
without any performance sacrifice. More
info.
PROGRAMMING Get DOM’d
The consortium for XML interoperability, OASIS, has joined with the National
Institute of Standards and Technology and have produced two new test suits
for the XML Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1. These are to be added
to the ever-increasing collection of OASIS Conformance Tests for XML Technologies
and they include ECMAScript and Java tests. The former provides instant
pass/fail results and you can view the test source code, link to the test
purposes, as well as link to the W3C DOM Recommendation's appropriate
section. More than 800 ECMAScript tests are included that cover all fundamental,
extended and HTML interfaces. The Java DOM Test Suite packs in more than
200 tests, likewise covering all fundamental and extended interfaces.
Public
website.
WEB Richer and Deeper Web Pages
Now integrated into Macromedia’s Dreamweaver
web development app is ContentWare from Openpages
Inc. Dreamweaver is used as the front–end authoring client,
and web developers can create, save, search for and retrieve content from
the ContentWare database without having to leave the application. Plus,
you can use Dreamweaver for web page creation on the fly with the Openpages'
manual page building capability. This allows you to create new pages in
real-time as you can directly access the rich content in the database.
Yep, going far beyond form-based template tools. More
info.
