[ebxml-dev] Re: ebXML doubts

Susan, I have been evangelising the use of ebXML MS for about 2 years within my own organisation. Last year Dick Brooks and Ian Jones were kind enough to come along and present to a reasonably large group of internal IT and business user staff. I may not have explained it all that well in my initial note but I have prepared a number of rebuttal statement that I suggest demonstrate the arguments put forward are not well thought through. Nonetheless as I'm sure you're already aware, convincing others that adoption of ebXML is a sound decision is not all that easy. As I said, the principle arguments are usually a) too complex, b) never heard of it - therefore not mainstream - therefore no 'out of the box interop', c) it's not GXA (or WSE in the latest terminolgy). Also of course many texts (and implementations) focus on relatively trivial messaging patterns. I have taken to presenting use cases and asking how these will be met by alternatives. What often comes back are similar ideas to ebXML MS but using proprietary headers and sometimes SOAP Body elements. I then move on to talk about tenets like :- - Re-invent as little as possible - Re-use as much as possible and about how interop is based in agreement of protocol standards (although I would have to agree that interop for all practical purposes is as much about the consistent implementation of such standards in mainstream toolkits - and although there are implementations of ebXML MS around they are not as high profile as Websphere and .Net - of course its not that hard to build an ebXML MS implementation - I have one in VB6 which we are using in production). Inerop is a two way street though. I am just as interested in getting ebXML positioned alongside the WS-xx specs (even though some people seem to regard these as 'standards already !), and if that means ebXML has to be less brass-necked about some areas then so be it. I may not like the politics of some organisations, but if they give me what I want, I'll take it every time and twice on Sundays - and so will my business customers (IT is a practical profession). One thing I would like to see is ebXML MS allow the use of DIME/WS-Attachments as well as SwA/Multi-part MIME for example. I'd like to be able to say, Microsoft doesn't support ebXML MS - so what ! (indeed I have made this point a number of times and don't restrict it just to Microsoft (IBM are also not hugely encouraging). Anyway, to cut a long reply short, I think what I am looking for is some new ammo. The people involved have heard my arguments me ad'nausism so I was hoping that you guys could provide me a few objective and dispasssionate hard to refute facts. How about it ? Regards Fraser. >From: Susan Struble >To: [email protected] >Subject: ebXML doubts >Date: Thu, 02 Jan 2003 12:00:36 -0800 > _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail Return-path: [email protected] Received: from nwkea-mail-1.sun.com ([192.18.42.13]) by mc5-f2.law1.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.5600); Thu, 2 Jan 2003 12:00:36 -0800 Received: from hsoak01a.ebay.sun.com ([129.149.70.1]) by nwkea-mail-1.sun.com (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA20251 for ; Thu, 2 Jan 2003 12:00:36 -0800 (PST) Received: from sun.com (dhcp-oako1-70-7 [129.149.70.167]) by hsoak01a.ebay.sun.com (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.3/ENSMAIL,v2.2) with ESMTP id MAA19395 for ; Thu, 2 Jan 2003 12:00:31 -0800 (PST) Date: Thu, 02 Jan 2003 12:00:36 -0800 From: Susan Struble Subject: ebXML doubts To: [email protected] Message-id: <[email protected]> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/html; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT X-Accept-Language: en-us, en User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020618 Netscape/7.0b1 X-OriginalArrivalTime: 02 Jan 2003 20:00:36.0272 (UTC) FILETIME=[9D8BCB00:01C2B299]