RE: [ebxml-dev] ebxml virtual appliance

["Roger Bass" <Roger@Traxian.com>]

Bryan, Matt, David et al,

I heartily agree with Matt's comments about ease of use being essential.
David and I are both involved offline in a project around Traxian's
offering, which I'd described to him as "Skype for B2B" (not that we'll
be trademarking that, obviously <g>). Traxian is a lightweight, uniform
client for integrating B2B seamlessly with popular applications like
QuickBooks - and which leverages hosted services to handle the
variability in different partner connections (i.e. format/protocol
translation, data aligment etc).

As some real-world background... our first product was a (fairly) pure
client-to-client model. Worked well in the lab... but in practice the
amount of tweaking and updating required on the client for each
end-to-end use case led to poor customer experiences and poor
supportability. Pure P2P implementations here can work fine
"out-of-the-box" where requirements and interfaces are well-defined and
stable - but we're a long way from that in the real world, especially
when SMB application integration (vs just file delivery) is a
requirement. Approaches that start with message delivery, and see app
integration as a "plug-in" will not work, in my view.

To your original question Bryan: the key requirement, I'd suggest, is
seamless end-to-end integration. Any technologies or standards that
relate to internal/B2B connections are fairly irrelevant from a user's
perspective, though they may matter for other reasons.

Regards,
Roger


-----Original Message-----
From: Bryan Rasmussen [mailto:BRS@itst.dk] 
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 4:13 AM
To: Ebxml-dev
Subject: [ebxml-dev] ebxml virtual appliance

Hi, I just sent off a question to XML-dev asking for wishes for XML
virtual
appliances

to-whit "What requirements should one have for an XML virtual appliance
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/cat/44

What OS should it run (thinking Ubuntu)
What tools should be configured and set up.
What presets should there be.
What protocols and presets might be useful.

what tools not yet built should there be integrated (these probably
prerolled
scripts, for example a script for checking directory of instances
against
range of Schema processors etc.)

I figure:

XSV,
Schema Quality Checker,
Sun's multi schema checker
Saxon
Exist

A repository of schemas?
"

Thinking of that repository of schemas made me think, what about an
Ebxml
virtual appliance. 

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen