Recipe for XML and Web-Services - The Low Carb alternative for EDI

EDI since decades have been the standard for inter-Organizational Information Exchange. Electronic data interchange (EDI) is the transmission, in a standard syntax, of unambiguous information of business or strategic significance between computers of independent organizations. EDI users do not have to change their internal databases. EDI is the common "language" used to get information from one computer system to another. Users must translate this information to or from their own computer systems, but this translation software has to be prepared only once.

EDI has some serious limitations, few of them being:

1. EDI is expensive, it uses a dedicated communication infrastructure.
2. The definitions used are far from flexible. For instance, it defines a limited set of protocols and terms with respect to a certain set criterion for specific industries. It does allow business users to add their own custom defined tags.

Becuase of the initial popularity of EDI, most of the financial, logistics and retail businesses depend on it for almost all their information exchange. However, the scenario is slowly changing as the industry leaders, along with standard EDI exposure are also providing an alternative interchange mechanics using Web-Services and XML as the new frontier. XML makes communication easy. It's a great tool for transactions between businesses.

So what is XML?

• XML is a meta-language. A meta-language is a language that's used to define other languages. You can useXML for instance, to define a language like Web Markup language (WML).
• XML is a smaller version of Standard Generalized Markup Language(SGML).
• It's easy to master and that's a major advantage compared to SGML which is a very complex meta-language.

XML: What can it do?

With XML you can :

• Define data structures.
• Make these structures platform independent.
• Process XML defined data automatically.
• Define your own tags.

However, with XML you cannot define how your data is shown. To show data, you need other techniques Like CSS or XSL along with your XML. XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) is created for this purpose. But the presentation can also be defined with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

Now Coming down to Web Services, What are Web Services?

• Web services are application components
• Web services communicate using open protocols
• Web services are self-contained and self-describing
• Web services can be discovered using UDDI
• Web services can be used by other applications
• XML is the basis for Web services

Web Services can convert your applications into Web-applications. By using Web services, your application can publish its function or message to the rest of the world.

Web Services can be used by other applications. With Web services your accounting department's Win 2k servers can connect with your IT supplier's UNIX server.

The basic Web Services platform is XML + HTTP. Web services use XML to code and decode your data and SOAP to transport it.

The Future of Web services - Don't expect too much, too soon.
The Web Services platform is a simple, interoperable, messaging framework. It still misses many important features like security and routing. But, these pieces will come once SOAP becomes more advanced.

Hopefully, Web services can make it much easier for applications to communicate.