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Making Connections to Suppliers, Partners, and Customers

Making Connections to Suppliers, Partners, and Customers

What are you trying to transfer? Is it a "secure to secure" transfer behind the scenes? Is it an e-commerce transaction with an end user?

XML, EDI, BPEL, SOAP, HTTPS, VPN, FTP, It can make your head spin!

There are several advantages of using all of these capabilities, but it really depends on what you are trying to do. For "classic" financial data transfers with older systems, and secure data transfer, most companies use EDI which provides distinct benefits to the financial user. According to EDIsource.com, "One of the most notable benefits to using EDI is the time-saving capability it provides. By eliminating the process of distributing hard copies of information throughout the company, easy access to electronic data simplifies inter-department communication. Also, another time-savings advantage is the ability to track the origin of all information therefore significantly reducing time spent on corresponding with the source of the information."

Another benefit for the user of this information system is the ultimate savings in costs for the company. Although the initial set-up costs may seem high, the overall savings received in the long run ensures its value. For any business, regardless of its size, hard-copy print outs and document shipping costs add up. EDI allows for a paper-less exchange of information reducing handling costs and worker productivity that is involved with the organization of paper documents."

XML.com tells us that XML is a markup language for documents containing structured information. Structured information contains both content (words, pictures, etc.) and some indication of what role that content plays (for example, content in a section heading has a different meaning from content in a footnote, which means something different than content in a figure caption or content in a database table, etc.). Almost all documents have some structure. A markup language is a mechanism to identify structures in a document. The XML specification defines a standard way to add markup to documents. XML can help the developer create a "consistent and standard" way of communicating between applications. XML has a lot of "overhead" and is not good for rapid or large transactions. ATAK killed 30 extremely fast servers trying to send job posting data with XML. One has to "build" the XML each time and that (in some cases) will bring a server to its knees.

A great way to communicate very fast between applications is to use Business Process Execution Language (or BPEL), this is a business process language that grew out of WSFL and XLANG. It is serialized in XML and aims to enable programming for very large and very fast data transfer with embedded business processes. It is important for application development to allow Internet communication between programs.

Then there is SOAP - No, not Tide - SOAP is a simple XML-based protocol to let applications exchange information over HTTP and Today's applications communicate using Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) between objects like DCOM and CORBA, but HTTP was not designed for this. RPC represents a compatibility and security problem firewalls and proxy servers will normally block this kind of traffic. A better way to communicate between applications is over HTTP, because HTTP is supported by all Internet browsers and servers. SOAP was created to accomplish this. SOAP provides a way to communicate between applications running on different operating systems, with different technologies and programming languages.

We can go on and on - but it's more about what you want to do, who you have to talk to, and how fast the connection has to be.