The Road to SOAP

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XML, Web Services, and the Data Revolution
By Frank  P.  Coyle
Table of Contents
Chapter 4.   SOAP


There are many threads leading to SOAP. Let's begin with the longstanding need to automate the exchange of data between business partners and with EDI, an established technology for doing just that.

The notion of business-to-business data exchange was around long before the term "B2B" came into vogue . As far back as the 1960s, companies turned to computer automation to reduce the paperwork burden associated with purchase orders, bills of lading, invoices, shipping orders, and payments. Driven by a need to standardize the exchange of data between companies doing business with each other, in 1979 the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) chartered the Accredited Standards Committee X12 (ASC X12) group to develop uniform standards for interindustry electronic interchange of business transactions. The result was a collection of standards known as the Electronic Data Interchange, better known today as EDI.

EDI works by providing a collection of standard message formats and element dictionaries so that businesses can exchange data using networks of their choice. EDI's early success in the transportation industry led to its adoption by other industries, including health care insurance, management, financial services, and government procurement. Over the past two decades over 100,000 organizations have used EDI to conduct business with partners and suppliers.

However, despite its success, EDI suffers from the same problem faced by all pre-Web, tightly coupled technologies: network lock-in. As Figure 4.2 shows, EDI is built around point-to-point networks that require partners to use software that implements EDI's data and messaging specifications. Writing software for EDI is not trivial. It is expensive both to develop and to maintain. In addition, once an EDI system is in place, changes must be agreed upon and implemented by all participants . This makes it difficult to change alliances, since it's costly to begin exchanging information with new partners. For medium- and small- size businesses, EDI's cost is prohibitive.

The downside of EDI and other point-to-point solutions for doing B2B data exchange is that no matter how sophisticated the middleware, there will always be a need for a WAN wrapper, a network over which to deliver the data. Using the Internet as the global WAN wrapper and XML as the data format, the problem of data distribution is greatly simplified. The missing piece is how to get the data from point A to point B, which leads us to HTTP.

ZwiftBooks Inc. and EDI

To help understand the issues behind EDI, consider our fictitious company ZwiftBooks in its efforts to use EDI to help find new sources of hard-to-get books. The CTO of ZwiftBooks has discovered that many of the major bookstores already use EDI to notify partners of books and prices. Each week the bookstores send data packets that contain listings of their latest inventories to partners. In order to participate in these exchanges ZwiftBooks must

  • buy or write software to decode the messages and data in conformance with EDI specs for the industry

  • pay for access to the wide area network used by the partners

  • incur fees for data transfer


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XML, Web Services, and the Data Revolution
XML, Web Services, and the Data Revolution
ISBN: 0201776413
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 106
Authors: Frank Coyle

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