The STAR eXchange

Standards are one of those things where they seem to take years to release.   Most organizations tend to release every couple of years and then only a few of the standards may have had new information.   However because of the time lag involved, many users tend to extend the standard to meet their immediate needs.    While STAR releases once a year to the public, STAR members can get immediate updates, evening nightly depending on their needs.   Other standards organizations like OAGIs are starting to do releases twice a year to meed their communities needs.   This is something that STAR may need to look into in the coming years.

The 2010 release includes changes from STAR members that cover additional requirements for Marine, Heavy Duty Truck, and Automotive.    In addition, the STAR Web Services Transport package now includes to levels of compliance.  STAR Level 1 and STAR Level 2.   The goal of the compliance rules are to promote interoperability of the transport.   The prior versions allowed too many items open to interpretation, and created a wide variety of one-off-implementations.  Through the hard work of several member companies, the new STAR transport was created to help alleviate this problem, and promote a truly interoperable transport.

The new specifications become effective July 4, 2010.

The STAR community in general is much more diverse than I think most realize. Too often we focus on the OEM, DMS, and Dealer relationship. However, there is a ripple affect that takes place.  Each of these entities deal with other trading partners, and they deal with others as well.   The STAR reach affects many areas that are not traditionally thought of when discussing the standards.  When we modify or deviate from the standard for our own convenience it affects everybody in the community.

An upcoming STAR eXchange Newsletter article will touch on these concepts in a bit more detail.  Look for it at the end of the month.

One of the constant themes I hear about users in STAR is the size of the XML files. That there is a problem parsing them, processing them, and in general trying to cram them into legacy data stores and using legacy technologies. One of the unfortunate side affects of data binding of XML is that everybody tries to use it for everything. The first and typically last tool a programmer will go for now a-days is a data binding framework. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily the best choice. In many cases, if you dig around in the xml tool bag you can find other choices.

Kurt Cagle has written an excellent rebuttal on the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that XML is not right for BIG Data. When we are talking BIG we are talking 50MB or larger. In fact, he rightly says:

Frankly, if you ARE storing your XMLdata in a relational database repository, then you’re throwing valuable money away, because you’re adding a hideous performance penalty on every transaction.

Kurt Cagle, XMLToday.com

He goes on to talk about the role of XML Databases and how in many ways they are out performing their relational database counterparts. STAR has several very large BODs that may need to be processed and queried. PartsMaster, LaborOperations, PartsPriceList, and RepairOrder are a few that come to mind. Processing these with data binding is definitely not the way to go. Supplementing an existing Relational Database with an XML Database can be very beneficial. It also allows you to work with XML natively without necessarily having to do a data transformation to get at the relevent information. Investigate your existing Relational Database as many have XML Data Storage abilities. XML can be a good fit for Big Data, it just takes using the right tool for the right job, and not trying to use the same tool for every job.

One of the items we hear consistently is that XML is to slow. This can mean many things and affects people differently depending on the tools that they use. At this past technical session, I gave a presentation on “Gossamer and You”. Gossamer for those that do not know is the Big Hairy Monster from the Warner Brothers cartoons. The point being is that XML is often treated like the monster under the bed. The gut reaction from programmers is to go with the most common form of working with XML. Data Binding. Unfortunately this can cause many of the problems that XML is blamed. The problem may not necessarily be XML but in the way we process it.

The Basilage Markup conference is having a “International Symposium on Processing XML Efficiently: Overcoming Limits on Space, Time, or Bandwidth”. It will visit many of the myths about XML and ways to over come these problems. The conference is being chaired by Michael Kay the author of the Saxon XSLT processor. If anybody is attending the Basilage conference and attends this forum, please post a comment to this entry and share what was learned.

MCLEAN, Va., May 18 — Standards for Technology in Automotive Retail (STAR), a global information technology standards body for retail automotive and related industries, has released its final set of schema repositories for its 2008-2009 publication cycle.

With this release STAR continues to prove that while it may be “Automotive” in name, STAR is more than capable of supporting related industries such as the medium and heavy-duty truck sector. In fact, a significant portion of the enhancements in this release can be attributed to requests made by STAR’s Truck segment. These requirements focused heavily in the area of Parts Management with updates to the Parts Inventory, Parts Prices List, and Parts Shipment specifications among others. This level of cross-industry harmonization is made possible through STAR’s use of a semantically flexible vocabulary creating functional equivalents that meet the needs of multiple industries.

In addition to proving itself as a cross-industry standard, STAR continued to strengthen its position as a globally-recognized standards solution in a project with European auto manufacturers, Renault SAS and PSA Peugeot Citroen. The manufacturers worked together with STAR to identify and incorporate needed enhancements into the STAR Sales Lead standard to meet international requirements. These enhancements have since been found to meet the needs of various U.S.-based users.

The ability of the STAR organization to develop open standards that bridge the gap between industries as well as regions is a testament to its commitment to the efficient and interoperable exchange of business communications.

STAR is technology dedicated to business efficiency.

Updated March 17, 2009: Added quote from Karla Norsworthy, VP, IBM.

STAR has joined the recently formed WSTF organization. The WSTF provides a place where various use case scenarios for Web Services implementations can be tested. This is different and goes beyond just specifying the profiles and specifications implemented by the various tooling vendors. This provides real world scenarios and usages that implementers and vendors run into. The flexibility that the various Web Service specifications provides, also provide interoperability concerns as well. Implementation and compliance to the WS-I profiles goes a long way to getting interoperability but stops short of the actual testing.

Since 2003 STAR has supported two main transport methods for its data standards. ebXML and Web Services. STAR has a specific set of specifications that it recommends for implementing its web services profile. However, over the years what we have seen is that the community that has adopted the STAR web service specification has implemented it in slightly different ways. This causes interoperability issues and one off implementations. These one off implementations occur because there is no central place for members to verify their implementations.

STAR plans to work with members of WSTF in helping to provide testable end points for its web services specification. This will not be a certification program, but a voluntary way that an adopter can test their implementation for specific scenarios. To help address some of the interoperability concerns, STAR will be releasing in the coming year a set of profiles that outline the items that MUST be supported. There will be two such profiles:

• STAR Level 1 – the minimum that must be supported. Including support for the WS-I basic profile, and Basic Security Profiles.

• STAR Level 2 – support for more advanced features such as WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Addressing, MTOM, WS-Security (digital certificates), and other enterprise level features.

“The partnership between STAR Standards and the Web Services Test Forum will enable both communities to expand their roles in the auto industry’s use of web services,” said Karla Norsworthy, Vice President of Industry Standards for IBM. “WSTF delivers a web services testing infrastructure for STAR to leverage and to improve the interoperability of Web Services for use by automotive retailers.”

STAR looks forward to working with existing tooling vendors like IBM, Oracle, and others. This collaboration will help current and future STAR adopters to have interoperable web service implementations. Reducing or eliminating one of the barriers to implementation.

Rick Jelliffe has written a blog entry entitled “Preventing standards death march..” that is relevant to STAR and how we develop our data standards. In Rick’s article he is recommending that standard organization commit to a scheduled release and update of their standards on a yearly basis.

For the last four years, STAR has been using Agile techniques to implement what Rick is suggesting to deliver our membership requests to the community sooner rather than later. Standards do not have to take years to develop, they can benefit their users sooner rather than later. One of the advantages to being a STAR member is that you get access to the Milestone and Draft releases as they are developed. Allowing you to adopt quicker to changing business requirements. The milestones and drafts are just development snapshots, the only official version is still the one approved by the membership and published once a year.

One of the questions we receive while at the NADA Convention is where more information in regards to working with the standards can be found. We have most of this information available freely to the user community on the STAR web site. Some of it may not be as easy to find as it should be, so here are a few places to look.

• STAR Technical Articles – This covers topics ranging from how to use the Web Service Interopability tools for the WS-I.org. As well as topics regarding security and digital certificates.
• STAR BOD FAQs – Many questions in regard to databinding, and parsing of XML and working with XML Schemas can be found on the FAQ page. One topic that comes up frequently is the performance of validation. The page contains some links to information on how Validation can be improved and implemented. In particular, some sample code on how to implement a grammar pool with Xerces is included.
• Press Releases and Conference Presentations – STAR presents at various technical conferences from time to time. Including how we use Agile Development techniques to develop the STAR standard.

The latest approved versions of the STAR XML Schemas, Transport, and Dealership Infrastructure Guidelines can always be found on the STAR website. The STAR website is a great resource for the community, it contains much more than just a place to retrieve the standards we develop. If you have thoughts on how we can improve the web site to make it easier to find the information you need, please let us know.