RE: Comment

[Bob Haugen <linkage@interaccess.com>]

Bob Haugen:
>> "A new kind of software is required here"
Jacques Mercey:
> YES, we do require new kind of software (off-the-shelf or own-grown) to
>deal with e-business conversations

Ok, we agree on that.

BH:
> "and it needs to be compatible at each end of the the conversation."

JM:
>Hummm, yeeesss, it depends on what you mean by "compatible". 
>Remember the "loosely coupled paradigm". 

I mean "capable of conducting the required conversations".
I like loosely coupled.  

JM:
>The conversation is defined at business level,
>not at technical level. It means that everyone who declares to support it is
>committed to do what is imposed by the contract at business level (send
>good, send money, build a machine, etc.) and, at application level, process
>and send messages according to what is defined in the collaboration. It does
>not make any assumption on the way he builds the machine or processes the
>messages. That is probably what Antoine wanted to say with "applications at
>each end will handle that".

I agree in theory, with the reservation that some technical
details may need to be agreed upon in practice, but would
of course like to minimize those.

I skipped some details of how you propose to implement
long conversations as being more suitable to another discussion,
in other words, there could be many ways to implement long
conversations given the same metamodel.  I'd have to test
yours to see if I liked it.

>FYI, also enclosed is the metamodel we use at MEGA.

Your diagrams make sense to me.  Your metamodel
appears to be mappable to the ebXML BP metamodel
with the simplification I just proposed in another current
thread.

Thanks for continuing the discussion; I think we are in
essential agreement.

Regards,
Bob Haugen