OAG and STEP convergence

Just back from a convergence meeting between OAGi and STEP (Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data). Lots of players including OMG PLM services, OASIS PLCS TC, Eurostep, PDES inc, etc. This is one of many convergence efforts building upon OAGIS as a platform. It is great to see so many standards coming together and doing the right thing. Sometimes the standards world can get distracted with egos and agendas and competition (to put it nicely). But it seems like convergence is the name of the game now and the rush to build upon OAGIS as a platform is becoming a stampede. Lots of work to do, but that is a good problem to have.

Some great upcoming news on OAGIS as a platform, so stay tuned!

STAR meeting

I am off today to participate in the STAR meeting in california. They are the consortium for standards in automotive retail. STAR has had some really great success in advocating and enabling data integration standards. They build their material on top of OAGIS, thus leveraging an existing data model. This is similar to what HR-XML is doing as well as others. (Look ma, standards convergence!)
I have more to say about OAGIS as a platform later as there is some interesting news. But for the time being, I'm off to STAR.

Microsoft gets behind UML

Could be real exciting news. I saw this posting from Joe McKenrick. Microsoft backing UML as part of its SOA (Oslo Modeler) offerings would be a real boon to the UML world. Templates that bring UML to Visio are nice, but getting backing in a bigger way is enticing. Hopefully they are not simply trying to create buzz. A few other links here and here.

Schema Lightener updated, version 1.1.1

I’ve finally gotten a moment to update the Schema Lightener (now version 1.1.1). Several of you have been requesting this and I am glad to make some progress on it.

Most notably, I’ve fixed the “stack overflow error” that sometimes occurred as a result of how namespaces in data (not tags) is handled by XSLT processors. The problem was when two element names (the value of xsd:element/@name and not the tag itself) were the same but with different namespace prefixes. XSLT can handle the namespace prefix in tags very well, but in the content of data, there are some caveats. And because we are parsing an xml schema, the data is in the content.

Long story short, the Schema Lightener is updated and no longer throws this error. I’ve tested this with OAGIS 9.2 stand alone schemas and got some really good results. 100% validity and significant reduction in the number of components when applied using the sample xml instances that come with it.

For OAGIS folks, when this is combined with the BOD Flattener, it can take a big cumbersome schema set and pair down as well as flatten into something much more manageable.

I would like to know what you want to see next:

1) a user interface of some kind (i.e. browse to the xsd to lighten)
2) ability to take multiple xml instances as input
3) improve performance
4) other ….

Send me an email to request a free copy or let me know what you want next.

off to Helsinki

I'm off to Helsinki Finland, doing some OAGIS training and consulting work there. My first time to that city, so I am excited.

using Ruby with windows

I've downloaded Instant Rails (Ruby on Rails), which is a development environment for Ruby in a windows setting. So far it has worked really well. Nice not to have to fuss with dual boot issues. And it comes with PHP and MySql in a nice all-in-one package.

Found this little gotcha in that if you are in windows, chances are good something already has port 80 taken. Edit your config to use another port. I have IIS already, so I had to change ports. Here is a blog post on this topic.

you asked, I delivered: Schema Lightener updated

Recently posted about the Schema Lightener tool. Some of you responded with a request to better support Xml Namespace prefixes. Now, you can use prefixes in either the Xml instance or the schema. This new version still uses xslt 1.0 technology. Send me an email and I'll send you a copy. As I've said its completely free.

Also, I've added in a command line XSLT processor, a batch file, and a couple sample schemas to help you get started.

Am also working on a version with xslt2.0 that will manage all your includes and imports with one invocation.