The program involves some rather important corporations, including Citi (which possessed $1.93 trillion in assets in 2008), Royal Dutch Shell (which had $282 billion at the same point in time), and Speranza (which has partnered with Microsoft, among other big companies).

As for what took place, a press release explained, “The scope of the pilot included a Shell corporate signer initiating instructions from a Speranza application and digitally signing using Citi-issued high assurance digital identities.  The messages were successfully tested for receipt and validation at Citi’s end.”

Rajesh Mehta, Citi’s Head of Treasury and Trade Solutions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, then stated, “We are delighted that we have been able to complete this first phase in the Swift eBAM XML pilot programme with our colleagues from Shell and will now look to continue our work in this space on the second phase in the programme.”

So stay tuned for more news about XML keeping everyone’s bank accounts safe and sound.

The Federal Register might be considered the American government’s official newspaper; it follows the movements of different federal agencies, along with the executive branch.  It was created 73 years ago, and currently puts out about 80,000 pages per year.

Impressive, right?  So it was nice to see Ray Mosley, the Director of the Federal Register at the National Archives and Records Administration, place XML on a bit of a pedestal.

He wrote in a post on the White House’s blog, “XML is a simple and flexible, machine-readable form of text that is easy to manipulate with software,” and said that it’ll save the government time and money.

Mosley also explained, “With an XML edition, independent organizations can reorganize the Register’s contents in ways that are more meaningful to you and address your personal interests; track issues that are likely to affect your community or your profession; and even engage in real-time public discussions about its contents with others across the country and around the world.”

A lot of people will probably be introduced to XML thanks to this move.  Hopefully it’ll lead to further adoption.

We’ve noted before that the recession has caused many hackers to step up their game - and a lot of non-hackers to rethink their stance - so security is an issue of ever-increasing importance.  Tools of just about every type are welcome in the fight, and according to a formal release, Defensics for XML is a doozy.

Codenomicon calls it “the first commercial product which helps software developers and integrators to find zero-day security problems in XML libraries and applications.”  Also, “The new test system provides an added capability for testing common XML-based protocols and file formats more efficiently and intelligently.”

And in case you’re curious about the inner workings, the release explains, “Codenomicon DEFENSICS product-line uses a methodology called fuzzing for the proactive elimination of critical security flaws before public exposure.  The intelligent fuzzing technique utilized by DEFENSICS takes XML message structures and alters them in ways beyond imagination.  XML communications can easily be corrupted by using a multitude of techniques, for example; breaking the encodings, repeating tags and elements or dropping them, adding recursive structures and special characters or causing overflows.”

Hopefully this’ll help protect you and let you breathe a little easier.

Granted, this development might not affect you personally.  Look at it as something that’ll benefit the XML community, though - the more people who are able to easily use XML, the better - and you’ll be getting into the swing of things.

The product that does the heavy lifting is known as the Progress DataDirect Data Integration Suite and its DataDirect XML Converters.  Dr. Carlo Innocenti, a senior XML program manager for Progress DataDirect, explained the need for it by stating, “XML is often used for data integration, but many applications need to process legacy data that isn’t immediately available in an XML format.”

He then continued, “With the DataDirect Data Integration Suite in use, Workday can create highly scalable data conversion and integration products that can quickly react to changing business and partner requirements.”

Workday specializes in enterprise-class SaaS-based Human Resources and financial solutions.  Hopefully this will result in a lot of people growing happier with XML and use of the markup language becoming more common.

Affected libraries include those from Apache, Python, and Sun, according to a statement from Codenomicon.  What’s more, the problems aren’t at all new, as they were discovered in early 2009, and the official release indicates, “The impact of the discovered vulnerabilities varies from denial-of-service attacks to potential execution of malicious code on affected systems.”

Obviously, this isn’t good news for members of the XML community.

The potential saving grace is that Codenomicon tried to keep everything under its hat until some fixes could be readied.  So, as long as the people behind the XML libraries do their job and you update your vulnerable software before someone takes a crack at the system, everything should be fine.

Also, if you’re curious about how Codenomicon came across all of these problems, the company’s supposed to release its new testing solution, DEFENSICS for XML, at a security conference in September.

Hopefully this scare will wind up being more of an educational opportunity than a disastrous development, then.

The idea behind this move was to make XML authoring possible (and indeed easy) for anyone using that ubiquitous word processor, Microsoft Word.

A Graphic Repro piece notes that Jeroen Van Rotterdam, a general manager at EMC, explained, “Organisations without an XML authoring solution are missing huge opportunities to create intelligent content that can lead to significant efficiency improvements in content driven applications.  The seamless integration between Quark XML Author for Microsoft Word and Documentum provides customers a unique solution for creating and managing XML today based on Microsoft Word, the most desired end-user interface.”

Indeed, even the most capable pros should appreciate anything that results in greater ease of use.  And if this makes getting XML newbies up to speed a simpler process, all sorts of productivity gains may be realized.

A third party in the form of Melissa Webster, who’s a program vice president for IDC, has given the move a sort of nod of approval.

Since some piano player in New Jersey owns the domain MichaelGray.com I had a few options but the best was to go with my middle initial and byt the domain MichaelAGray.com. Since I’m all about wordpress as a CMS I put the files up, put up my theme of choice thesis, tweaked it with the thesis reputation skin, and installed the XML Sitemaps plugin. I set it up to ping all of the search engines as shown below:

Within 4 days the homepage for the domain was showing in Bing and Google as shown below (yahoo just didn’t love me enough)

I’m a big advocate of using sitemaps, and I think this demonstrates their effectiveness. Unless you have a really small site or really good site architecture, chances are some parts of your website aren’t as exposed, or well linked as others, and this helps you spoon feed the search engines your content insuring better crawling.

That’s not to say you should use sitemaps and not worry about spiders being able to crawl, because internal anchor text can play a huge role in SEO. However use on XML sitemaps as a redundant backup plan to help make sure you fully crawled and indexed.

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They, like me, see time to act as a critical measure. Accelerating timely and appropriate action in response – how long it takes you from a touch point event to the correct response – should therefore be a focus for companies. Operational Intelligence is their approach to reducing this time and involves visibility (events from many sources, KPIs, dashboards), insight (correlate events, detect patterns, analyze trends) and action (business event management, process management). They see this as particularly important in areas where a real-time response makes a real difference like SLA management, compliance monitoring, call centers, fraud detection, sensor networks etc. Taking these one at a time:

Visibility – users must be able to go get the data. Vitria has a long history of integration work and is able to pull data from lots of different databases and applications. They have added event feeds like JMS, RSS feeds and more. Everything is treated like an event source and their active connectors turn data changes in data sources into events. A web-based environment for monitoring and displaying is provided and this is aimed at a business user/analyst. The UI allows users to define KPIs, SLAs, use various visualizations etc.

Insight – a Complex Event Processing engine supporting correlation, time series and trending, analysis. The engine is XQuery based so it can handle complex XML packets natively, important given the growth in XML based messages. Some simulation/what-if analysis. A pretty typical set of functions for correlation and analysis over various dimensions/moving windows/trending.

Act – policies or business rules are defined to determine what to do in response. Significant events are evaluated against policies and these trigger actions such as initiating a business process. Audit trails etc. are provided because everything is in M3O and can be stored and analyzed.

From a usage point of view users define the interface using a Yahoo Pipes-like approach where things are hooked up to each other. Modeling involves processes defined using BPMN and executing on the Vitria process engine. A typical BPMN editor is provided for process definitions while Event Policies (which allow large numbers of conditions against any part of the event) specify the conditions against an event that can be used to take actions, trigger processes etc. This allows a more dynamic matching of the events and processes. The event correlation engine can embed data, trends etc in messages that can be used by event policies and these can feed back into the event processing engine to close the loop. Monitoring and managing of these processes and events is supported also. I was pleasantly surprised with the direction Vitria has taken.  The product had a nice simple UI designed to empower business users so they can turn the knobs of the company right from their chairs.

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Many years ago, Toronto-based i4i was granted a patent related to “[s]ystem and method for generating an XML-based fault model.”  The abstract specifically mentioned Word documents, and then such documents were named many more times throughout the rest of the application.

As for the subject of legal contention, Emil Protalinski reports, “Word 2003 and Word 2007 use extensible markup language (XML) for encoding and customizing the XML in a way that i4i believes infringes on its patent.”

Now, a federal jury’s sided with i4i, and you might judge the importance of the decision in light of the fact that i4i’s website is down (think traffic overload).  With most tech-related companies, that sort of thing doesn’t happen every day.

Unfortunately for i4i (and perhaps XML pros who would look to the company as something of a hero), Microsoft does intend to appeal the $200 million verdict, so it may be quite a while before anything’s final and money changes hands.

Around 75,000 people from 25 nations submitted applications to the contest.  Brazil’s Renzo Nuccitelli won first place overall, and so seems like someone who’s really earned a place on a pedestal among XML professionals.  Nuccitelli’s email address must be a hot commodity right now as people seek advice or try to make a hire.

Otherwise, India’s Anil Mahadev was named top developer in the “Ported Application” category.  Yasuhiro Nonaka of Japan won the “Query Challenge” contest.

Then, an official release goes on to state, “Dual winners of the 2008 ‘Gadget Challenge’ competition were Ontario, Canada’s Zaidan Alaoui and Maharashtra, India’s Vibha Pandya. . . .  Rahsheen Porter, Grayson, Geo. (USA) and his video entry and Rendra Setiawan, Jakarta, Indonesia, were winners of the ‘Video Mania’ contest.”

Congratulations all around to these champs.  And the many runners-up should remember that it might not be too early to start practicing for next year’s contest.