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IBM, Oracle, SAP, Sun and Others to Support XML.Org
Section: 10. Internet
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured
Information Standards (Oasis) has received financial
commitments worth
$500,000 for its portal project, XML.org. For $100,000
apiece, Oasis members IBM, Oracle, SAP and Sun Microsystems
have
become Founding Partners in XML.org, while Commerce One,
DataChannel, Documentum, the Graphic Communications
Association (GCA) and SoftQuad have stumped up $25,000
each for the portal. Conspicuous by its absence is Microsoft
Corp.
Microsoft did join Oasis in June 1999, but only after
announcing its BizTalk portal on the same day Oasis
announced plans for
XML.org. Both portals will act as repositories for XML
schemas, but BizTalk.org will only publish schemas that work
within
Microsoft's BizTalk "framework". Oasis has insisted all
along that XML.org will be vendor-neutral - ie, it will
publish schemas
that work with any framework. Small wonder that Microsoft
has so far withheld the $100,000 contribution to XML.org
expected
from it as an Oasis member.
In other XML news, UserLand Software Inc and Digital
Creations Inc have agreed to make their flagship content
management
systems, Frontier and Zope, work together using the
XML-RPC standard. UserLand has also chosen Zope as its
deployment
server for Unix environments. Championed by UserLand,
XML-RPC (the RPC stands for remote procedure calling) lets
programs
operate within other programs, rather like a low-end
Corba or COM. "XML-RPC will simplify the development of
distributed
systems that leverage the advantages of three operating
systems - Mac OS, Windows NT and Linux," explained UserLand
president Dave Winer.