Host: Center for Design Research, Stanford University

Workshop on
Integrating XML and Distributed Object Technologies

Call for Papers and Workshop Description

Submission Format

Important Dates

Registration

Final Agenda

Workshop Organizers

Contact

Call for Papers and Workshop Description

The Internet world is being transformed before our eyes as open standards such as XML are being rapidly adopted. The XML technologies are being seen as harbinger of various new functionality in numerous domains ranging from electronic commerce to electronic publishing to healthcare delivery to manufacturing to insurance. Various object-oriented technologies and standards such as Java, CORBA and DCOM have also progressed rapidly in the past few years. At this time, the industry and academia are seriously looking at the intersection of these technologies and what it means to the future of the object-web paradigm. This workshop aims to bring together participants who are seriously investigating the combined use of these technologies to support practical application needs in a variety of domains. The goal of this workshop is to investigate how XML and Distributed Object technologies such as Java, CORBA and DCOM can be integrated leveraging the strengths each have to offer.

• Integrating XML and Distributed Object technologies
• Advances in XML: DOM, SAX, XSL, Schemas, XLink as it relates to Objects
• Advances in CORBA 3.0, Java, DCOM as it relates to XML
• Tools and utilities that facilitate integration of XML and object-technologies
• Application of XML and Object technologies in E-commerce, Finance, Healthcare, Publishing, Insurance and Manufacturing and System Integration. The purpose of these examples should be to show specific successful integration approaches of XML and objects.

Submission Format

Papers should contain original contributions not published or submitted elsewhere, and references to related state-of-the-art work. Authors of accepted papers are expected to present their views of the field at the oral presentation.

Final papers may not exceed 6 pages in IEEE format [http://www.computer.org/cspress/instruct.htm], which is single-spaced, 10-pt Times -- something in the vicinity of 2000-2500 words, depending on the number of graphics included.

Papers should be electronically submitted as Word 95 or 97 files, or as RTF files to juggy@cerc.wvu.edu. Files may be zipped. We will acknowledge all submissions. Additionally, authors may send the URL of their paper and/or of their home page to be included into the WWW page of the workshop.

Full papers accepted for the workshop will be included in the post-proceedings.

The best paper of the workshop will be nominated for the WETICE best-paper award.

Paper submissions are not required for participation in the workshop. If you plan to participate and want to receive a copy of the question/topics-list prior to the workshop, please contact the organizers.

If you have further questions or remarks, don't hesitate to contact the workshop organizers.

Important Dates

Final Agenda

Distributed Object Technologies.

1. The role of metadata management in XML and distributed object technologies. Can we operate without a solution in this area? Should it be a standardized solution? What will the roles of OMG/XMI and MDC/OIM (MS XIF) be in the future?

2. Do we need standards for "XML and distributed technologies"? If we do, which organization should standardize the specs and what should they contain? UML Class Diagrams, XML DTD's, IDL?????

3. The two technologies XML and CORBA, are they synergistic or competitive? If we implement XML well, do we then delay the broad introduction of CORBA or make it easier for systems integration in the future?

4. one issue that has come up is the concern of XML processing complexity and potential large sizes of data transferred within the distributed environment. One question for example, might be: is there a need for data compression to compensate for the overhead added by the extra XML tags, etc.

5. A summary of W3C Standardization activities, their inter-dependence, and timelines for recommendations

6. An up-to-date summary of XML tool (parsers, authoring tools, ...) and their compliance with the various W3C standards (XML 1.0, DOM level 1, ...).

7. Will XML and associated standards provide a complete solution for distributed object systems on the Web, i.e. a WebBroker strategy would be preferred over COM or CORBA?

8. Will information become generically available over the Web in XML, i.e.will all medical data be made available? What would it take?

9. Could a complete distributed medical records system be implemented on the Web that crossed institutions and provided a unique URL for a lifetime patient medical record?

10. Possible case study for discussion (quote from one of the participants): "Our architecture is based on distributed objects thru low speed X25 connections. We have Windows NT clients (with Borland C++Builder and Visigenic) and Solaris server (with Orbix).The final deployment covers all the airport touched by Air France. We use UML (with Rational Rose) as our OOA tool. We started the development one year ago using CORBA as the middleware. But due to hard experiences facing the idl maintenance (and compatibility between ORB vendors) we recently turned to XML as the definition of our attributes (the transport is still assured by CORBA). The fact is that we have pushed the XML object attribute management very far (too far ?) It seems so simple to handle that I am afraid of falling into a mouse trap. Instead of relying on IDL structures, we (now) build everything on simple XML strings. All of our business objects include one (or more) of these XML classes which represent coherent ensembles of data We even discuss with the SQL database (ORACLE 7.3.4) on an XML basis (using call to stored proc and XML functions) I really need to meet (or discuss) with some prject leader/developers to see if it is a general direction or a private failure"

11. Advantages/drawbacks of using 'lower-level' communication protocols like HTTP with XML - compared to 'higher-level' protocols such as CORBA/IIOP

12. Different ways how XML can be tied into the object world (e.g. DOM vs.self-defined object models)

13. Is XML really the 'tool of choice' for distributed object technologies? - how can it help? - what are the shortcomings (e.g. 'un-typed' data), what extensions do we need/expect for the near future?

14. The above is just the beginning and we don't like discussions points to stop at 13! J .

Registration

Please refer to the main web site for WET ICE.

Workshop Organizers

Contact

Please send all inquiries regarding this workshop to:

For inquiries regarding WET ICE in general, contact wetice@cerc.wvu.edu or call (U.S.) +1-304-293-7226.

http://wwwagr.informatik.uni-kl.de/~koetting/WETICE99/
Last update: June 11, 1999