TEAM Zarate Tarrani Notes From the Field

A Promise Kept. Yesterday I promised to cover XML conformance in today's entry, and have many valuable artifacts on the topic to share. But first things first: I want to extend a heartfelt and sincere happy birthday wish to my friend and colleague Linda Zarate. Linda's entries here, her role in the family of web pages we maintain, and her collaboration on countless projects, papers and deliverables showcase her talent. She is also a well respected and prolific book reviewer, but most of all, my cherished friend.

On Standards Making. In my Wednesday, 13 February entry I expressed some concern about the fact that the ebXML standard was under the cognizance of Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT). The concern was that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which has cognizance over the XML standard, was not involved with the ebXML standard.

As it turns out, OASIS has a powerful collaborating partner: NIST. My concerns have been greatly assuaged. In addition, NIST and OASIS have teamed to develop XML conformance tools, which directly support their ebXML initiative.

Conformance and Testing - Tools and Documents. Among the most valuable artifacts to come out of the OASIS/NIST collaboration is the XML Conformance Test Suite. This suite is consistent and compatible with the W3C XML Coordination Group's XML 1.0 (Second Edition) Recommendation.

The NIST side of the collaboration is driven by their Software Diagnostics and Conformance Testing Division, which has an impressive collection of general and specific conformance test documents that are publicly available. Examples of initiatives from NIST include the conformance test suite for XMLSchema Part 2: Datatypes and their Web Technologies Group work with XML, XSL and DOM.

Related Resources. Other sources of XML and ebXML information that I've been using in my research include:

• Lisa Rein's website. Ms. Rein is an acknowledged XML expert with an impressive record of accomplishments and contributions in the XML domain. I also recommend regular visits to her weblog to find out what she's thinking because what she has to say about a number of topics is worth a listen.
• Xegis, which is a weblog that covers XML and related technologies. It's regularly updated and is one of my primary sources of information.
• XML-Dev. Another weblog that is regularly updated and is a good source of XML (and related topic) news and commentary.
• XML Hack. Yet another weblog that provides developer news from the XML community.

Ending Notes. I'll end this with some miscellaneous resources that I found worth bookmarking: Intranet Journal is an online news source for intranets. The focus is infrastructure and the content is fresh and useful.

WebMacro, which is a 100% Java open-source servlet framework, is worth a look. I'm mentioning this open source tool/framework because it explicitly supports separation of concerns, which is the key goal of aspect-oriented software development (see my 8 February entry).