Scott Davis makes a case for metadata or semantic data, pointing out that it is currently used by major websites to improve their traffic or the rank of the pages searched. He is presenting the most common ways to add metadata to a document: RDFa and microformats.
Eobject.org's open-source Java framework MetaModel implements a unified API for the access, exploration, and query of different datastores. Eobjects.org, both a website and an open source software organization dedicated to "the development of Open Source software related to Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing", has recently published version 1.5 of MetaModel.
Microsoft Research has open sourced the Common Compiler Infrastructure: Metadata (CCI) and CCI: Code and AST projects containing a set of libraries used by compilers and other programming tools to manipulate metadata in CLR assemblies and debug files. The CCI: Metadata components subsume System.Reflection while CCI: Code and AST subsumes System.CodeDom.
Anil John writes about Information Disclosure Threats and Web Services. In his article he delves into the details of how potential attackers use to prepare their attacks and how some common web service practices ‘support’ these threats.
While many think of Aspects for cross-cutting concerns such as transaction management, persistence and role based security, another key value for them has been as an enabler for Annotations for ordinary projects. Using Aspects as a way to implement annotation handlers is a different way to think of them than as the traditional architect's "cross cutting concerns" view.
One of the key takeaways from this survey is that SOA is real and happening on a large scale. Governance was critical or moderately important for 91% of the respondents. The survey also sampled the most popular SOA standards. InfoQ spoke with Miko Matsumura, Deputy CTO of Software AG, who commented the results.
