Brilliant Steve, to say the least...
Here's my dig...
XML has a good role to play in "facilitating" B2B...I forsee XML being used
more for exchanging meta information rather than information itself (may be,
exchanging EDI implementation guides ;-) and trading partner
agreements)..for B2C scenarios, XML/XSL combination will rule (may be even
for some non-trivial B2B scenarios)...
Most importantly, XML does not solve the problem of application-EDI
integration...even ebXML is not addressing that (finger is being pointed to
at BPML)...this is "the" crux of the problem for slow adoption of EDI...this
is where one has to know a bit of EDI for mapping...this is where all EDI
systems differ...this is where all B2B XML systems will even differ...so,
does XML, replaces EDI? By the way, why did BASDA efforts failed in the
direction of formalising Application-EDI integtration?
And what about the robustness of the system, strong type checking etc...I
hope compile time errors are not shifted to runtime (use of non-compiled
XSL)!...I am not saying that XML is processed only using XSL...ofcourse one
can use C++ to do the same, and most will probably do just that for
B2B...what I am trying to point out is the pitfalls of XML/XSL hype for B2B
EDI vendors should be the happiest of the lot if XML takes-of in any variant
of B2B...for them XML-ised file is like any other file format, just like
X12, EDIFACT, database schema and other user defined file formats...yes, it
will take them some effort to incorporate "attributes - mapping", since most
of them would have used a direct string interface to read the file...there
are various ways in which this can be achieved...and they all know it...
ebXML is at least doing the right thing by using MIME for packaging ebXML
(vs using XML for packaging XML) using S/MIME for security (Rik Drummond
knows too well why OBI failed?), identifying payload through a processing
instruction (may be EDI content!), etc...
Internet bandwidth is cheap and free is a flawed and short-sighted notion...
So much for the weekend...
Thank you,
Ajay
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