BizTalk

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The BizTalk initiative was started by Microsoft to address the issue of moving business documents between trading partners in the e-commerce supply chain. BizTalk provides an elegant envelope for moving electronic documents around the Internet in the same way the postal service moves physical envelopes between trading partners.

BizTalk is really four different facets of a single initiative. First there is the BizTalk Framework Independent Document Specification. The BizTalk Framework is a set of tags that provides an addressing definition so that you can get your documents from one place to another and cause some kind of processing to happen at each place. The BizTalk Framework works like a virtual envelope for sending business documents to our trading partners.

Second, BizTalk.org is a Web site that provides a place to learn about ecommerce technologies—XML in general and BizTalk in particular. BizTalk.org hosts discussion groups where you can find peer support for developing your own document vocabularies, named schemas, and help in integrating your schemas into the BizTalk Framework. BizTalk.org is also a repository for schemas (definitions for XML documents) and allows you to post your schemas for others to access. This service is free.

Third, to process your BizTalk documents, you will need a BizTalk Framework Compliant (BFC) server. A BFC server is the software that reads BizTalk documents and then does something intelligent with them. The intelligent thing it does will depend on what systems you have in place and what needs to be done to process the document.

And fourth, there is Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000, which runs on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. Because of the open nature of the BizTalk Framework specification, you can create BizTalk messages on a Linux system running a BizTalk server written in Java and read the messages on a Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server using BizTalk Server 2000.

BizTalk is viewed by some as a Microsoft-specific protocol that requires Microsoft platforms. This is not the case. The first three facets of BizTalk that I've outlined here are not proprietary to Microsoft in any way. Two Java applications can pass data back and forth using BizTalk messages. Businesses that run on UNIX can use schemas published to BizTalk.org. A BizTalk server can be written in Perl or any other Internet-aware programming language.

In this book, we will write a BizTalk server using OmniMark, an internet-savvy programming language with built-in support for XML documents.