SOFTALK Tomorrow: XML, The Least You Need To Know

Rohit Khare (rohit@bordeaux.ICS.uci.edu)
Wed, 14 Jan 1998 14:31:40 -0800


Tomorrow, Thursday January 15, I will deliver a Softalk compressed from a
presentation I will give next Monday in Basel. It will be at 2PM in ICS253

XML: The Least You Need To Know

is a survey of the whole XML phenomenon, with particular emphasis on how it
affects application design.

Rohit Khare

============================

Please distribute that invitation among your colleagues.
CHOOSE and SI are grateful for any update on email addresses of their
members. Please send them to si@ifi.unizh.ch.
Sorry for any duplicates.

Thank you.
Regula Nebel

========================================================================
News from the SYSTOR Research Center

SYSTOR/CHOOSE- Event with Rohit Khare & Adam Rifkin: 'XML for Software
Construction: Distributed Systems and the Web'

Content: XML for Software Construction: Distributed Systems and the Web.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is "SGML for the masses". It
brings the formerly arcane SGML (Standard Generalized Markup
Language) technology to a wider audience.
In addition to being a cure for many HTML and web related
problems it can be used in software development to achieve
smaller, better and more flexible software. Some problems have
plagued the software community since ages, like thousands of
different data formats, code bloat due to repeated but always
slightly different parsing algorithms, maintenance nightmares
from simple configuration files that get changed to how to
define and access meta-information dynamically.

Only recently it has become clear that especially in the area
of distributed computing XML can play a major role for
serialization, evolution of classes and information (how do we
change information without breaking interfaces?) and legacy
migration (how can we build systems that can deal with
different domain languages like "SBC" and "UBS"?)

And last but not least XML is going to be the future of the
WEB. Web interface definition language shows how services can
be described outside of any programming language and clients
can use these descriptions to access services. Channel
definition formats describe software and constraints that
enable powerful but still safe push technology. Ressource
description framework transforms the WEB into the worlds
largest repository. All these developments are based on XML.

This event combines a more document centric view (WEB,
publishing) with views from the distributed computing camp.
What seemed to be lightyears apart initially is coming together
rapidly.

In collaboration with CHOOSE (the Special Interest Group on
Object-Oriented Software Engineering of "Schweizer Informatiker
Gesellschaft", --> http://iamwww.unibe.ch/CHOOSE/), we are
proud to welcome Adam Rifkin and Rohit Khare for a talk at
SYSTOR.

Since Rohit Khare and Adam Rifkin are experts in the area of
the Web and distributed systems, we are sure that they can give
you lots of useful hints, not only for XML.

Walter Kriha has used a SGML subsystem in a large framework
project. He will show how the overall architecture benefits
from such a component and how it can be integrated.

Best regards
SYSTOR-Research

Audience: Designers, Architects, Domain Modelers, Developers, Web
Specialists, ...

Abstract: The history of XML (eXtended Markup Language), its form and
structure (relationship to
SGML, etc), its market support, future development. Then, a
review of its
potential for affecting commerce, archiving, and likely
application areas.

Rohit Khare: Rohit Khare (http://xent.ics.uci.edu/,
khare@alumni.caltech.edu) served as a
member of the MCI Internet Architecture staff in Boston, MA in
the
summer 1997, where he wrote several papers about XML with Adam
Rifkin. He was previously on the technical staff of the World
Wide Web
Consortium at MIT, where he focused on security and electronic
commerce
issues, and he has served as the editor of the World Wide Web
Journal
for two years. He has been involved in the development of
cryptographic
software tools and Web-related standards development. Rohit
received a
B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science and in Economics from
California
Institute of Technology in 1995. He joined the Ph.D. program
in
computer science at the University of California, Irvine in
Fall 1997.
Adam Rifkin: Adam Rifkin (http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/,
adam@cs.caltech.edu) received
his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from the College of
William and
Mary. He is presently pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science at
the
California Institute of Technology, where he works with the
Caltech Infospheres
Project http://www.infospheres.caltech.edu/ on the composition
of distributed active objects. His efforts with infospheres
have won best paper awards both at the Fifth
IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed
Computing
in August 1996, and at the Thirtieth Hawaii International
Conference on
System Sciences in January 1997. He has done Internet
consulting and
performed research with several organizations, including Canon,
Hewlett-Packard, Griffiss Air Force Base, and the NASA-Langley
Research
Center.

Speakers: Adam Rifkin and Rohit Khare

Prerequisites: OO concepts, HTML knowhow

Date: January, 19th 1998

Time: 9:00 - 12:30 (1/2h break) Talk by Rohit Khare & Adam Rifkin
12:00 - 12:30 Talk by Walter Kriha on ''How to
integrate SGML/XML in large projects"

Place: Ausbildungszentrum Bankverein Basel

Registration: until 12.1.98

Please send Mail to Regula Nebel for the registration
SYSTOR AG
Frau Regula Nebel
Lautergartenstr. 6
4002 Basel
Tel.: 061 228 53 98
Fax: 061 228 51 26
Email: regula.nebel@systor.com

This event is free for all attendees.
More Info: The XML papers Rohit Khare and Adam Rifkin have written
together include:

X Marks the Spot: Using XML to Automate the Web,
by Rohit Khare and Adam Rifkin
(<cite>IEEE Internet Computing</cite>, July/August 1997, Volume
1, Number 4,
Pages 78-87),
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/papers/xml/x-marks-the-spot.htm
l

The Evolution of Web Documents: The Ascent of XML,
by Dan Connolly, Rohit Khare and Adam Rifkin
(<cite>World Wide Web Journal</cite>, Autumn 1997, Volume 2,
Number 4,
Pages 119-128)
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/papers/xml/ascent-of-xml.html

Capturing the State of Distributed Systems with XML
by Rohit Khare and Adam Rifkin
(<cite>World Wide Web Journal</cite>, Autumn 1997, Volume 2,
Number 4,
Pages 207-218)
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/papers/xml/xml-for-archiving.ht
ml

The Origin of (Document) Species
by Rohit Khare and Adam Rifkin
(submitted to the WWW7 Conference http://www7.conf.au/
in Brisbane, Australia, April 14-18, 1998)
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/papers/www/origin-of-species.ht
ml

For more information on the programme contact

Regula Nebel
(contact information see above)

or our web site
http://systor-www.systor.com/know/research/events

Please send us your questions and suggestions on the topic, we
will try to address them in the event and / or include some
information / links in the handout.

How to find: Ausbildungszentrum Bankverein Basel, Viaduktstrasse
33, CH - 4000 Basel
on foot from train station 'Bahnhof SBB' in less than 5 minutes
tram station 'Markthalle' with tram number 1, 2, 8, 16
tram station 'Zoo' with tram number 10, 17 (yellow)
Highway exit 'City' left lane in the direction 'Bahnhof'

[You can find a map at http://systor-www.systor.com/know/research/events]