Zurich, Switzerland (December 20, 2001) - The International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress (CIP4) today announced the public release of a beta version of an XML Schema and a Software Development Kit (SDK) for CIP4's Job Definition Format (JDF) and related Job Messaging Format (JMF). The Schema will allow developers to test the JDF they produce using standard XML tools. It can be freely downloaded from www.cip4.org/Schema/JDF_1.xsd "Release of schema is a major milestone in the development of JDF as the open standard of interoperability in the printing industry. The human-readable JDF specification has been available for some time. The schema provides a computer-readable representation of the JDF specification, and defines both the required structure of the data and the terms that will be used to describe each element of that data. CIP4's release of JDF schema, along with a validation tool, allows the developers at the many companies who are currently building JDF-based workflow solutions to provide interoperability between those solutions." said Jim Mekis, Vice President of the PrintTalk consortium and a CIP4 member. The Schema conforms to the W3C schema recommendation as described in the W3C XML schema recommendation www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-0/ and related documents. Usage of the SDK is free to all for purposes of research, in-house use and testing. Commercial usage (selling SDK based products for profit) is limited to CIP4 full and partner members. It is available for download at: www.cip4.org/open_source Developer support is available via an open eMail forum, [email protected] "We are very excited to provide this toolkit to the worldwide developer community. The SDK will enable developers to quickly and efficiently add JDF connectivity to their products." said Dr. Rainer Prosi, Technical Officer of CIP4. The SDK is based on the Apache Xerces XML parser (see xml.apache.org) and contains high level JDF and JMF manipulation classes as well as typesafe access to JDF attributes and elements. The initial implementation is designed to be platform independent. It is written in C++ in a Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 environment. It comes with HTML documentation and a host of sample applications, including a complete JDF and JMF validator.