How successful the effort ultimately will be is anyone's guess. But if participation is any indication, the electronic business eXtensible Markup Language (ebXML) should begin appearing in the global marketplace soon.
In a guest essay for Interactive Week, two of the men who oversaw the unprecedented effort, Klaus-Dieter Naujok, chairman of the ebXML Initiative, and Ralph Berwanger, vice chairman at the American National Standards Institute's Accredited Standards Committee X12, discuss creation of the new infrastructure and its future.
It began in September 1999. The UN technology group and an international technology business consortium called Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) announced they were joining forces to produce a global XML framework for electronic business. Immediately, more than 120 companies and standards bodies signed on to begin the "ebXML Initiative." Eighteen months later, in a May meeting in Vienna, more than 1,000 participants ratified the first generation of ebXML and began delivering the infrastructure.
With that ratification come several key questions: Can first-generation ebXML be implemented successfully? Is the infrastructure complete? And are there plans for follow-on support to ebXML? The short answers are: yes, yes, yes!
Version 1: Proven Specs
Implementing version 1 of anything can be risky. prudent consumers wait while the foolhardy dive in to find undocumented features. Why should either the vendor or user communities implement the first generation of the ebXML specifications?
The strongest argument for using the specifications is that they are built upon established technology. No new protocol was invented. The various project teams evaluated proven technology as the baseline for all specifications. Specification authors leveraged as much existing technology as possible, including the World Wide Web Consortium's XML Schema, XML Linking Language, and the XML Signature Syntax and Processing specification. Additionally, a broad series of references from the Internet Engineering Task Force's Request for Comments were considered. Even initiatives that started after the ebXML project was under way were carefully examined, including Security Services Markup Language, Simple Object Access Protocol and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration. SOAP was successfully incorporated into the Message Servicing Specification.
Another strength is that the user and vendor communities are being provided with a set of specifications that have been proven to work. The ebXML Proof of Concept Project team exercised the proposed architecture during multiple public demonstrations in which dozens of companies showed that the specifications could be implemented and interoperate. One vendor demonstrated the entire infrastructure, end-to-end; other vendors implemented components of the ebXML system and allowed the components to "talk" with other components in a network. Other demonstrations evidenced one user operating components from multiple vendors as a single, integrated solution. The presentations did not portray the intensity of a fully operational business-to-business system, but they established that small, midsize or large enterprises can quickly configure ebXML environments that support member registration, trading partner discovery and secure business data exchange.
Lastly, the ebXML infrastructure is the only open, out-of-the-box, standards-based solution available and ready for use. Several competing commercial solutions are available, most notably Microsoft's BizTalk Framework. Many of these solutions are very good. It should be no surprise that solutions qualified as "very good" provided significant contributions to the ebXML specifications. However, none support all the business verticals simultaneously. Enterprises electing to use one of these commercial solutions may not be able to participate in a truly global environment. The ebXML answer is XML-based and transport protocol-neutral. Its developers crafted a solution that allows traditional Electronic Data Interchange, XML-based or proprietary payloads to be communicated between businesses and partners using common or different vocabularies.
