Shopping Without Dropping. DOD EMall Embraces ebXML

[David RR Webber - XML ebusiness <Gnosis_@compuserve.com>]

Shopping Without Dropping. DOD EMall Embraces New XML Extension to
Handle Transactions of $1 Million Weekly
Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

To keep pace with spiraling traffic, the Defense Department's EMall
portal is shifting to an emerging transactions standard based on th
Extensible Markup Language (XML).  The portal is one of the largest
online operations -- inside government or out -- to adopt the standard,
called Electronic Business Using XML, or ebXML. By spring, the DOD
EMall team expects the purchasing portal will be completely powered
by ebXML.  The mall's business has been growing while the systems
supporting it have gotten more complex, said Debra Roobol, the DOD
EMall program manager and chief of the Defense Logistics Agency's
E-Commerce and Standards Branch. Those systems -- managed by a trio
of prime contractors -- processed about 360,000 transactions in
fiscal 2003, or about $1 million per week. This year, the number of
transactions will grow to 475,000, Roobol estimated. EbXML has advanced
features useful to DOD EMall, ICF's Byrd said. It can eliminate
duplicate orders and allow automatic retries if first attempts fail.
It also supports asynchronous processing -- if one part of the system
is slow to respond, the order will be routed without requiring the
user to wait for confirmation. Another advantage is that ebXML is
interoperable with Web services environments that do not use BEA
products or J2EE components.

http://gcn.com/23_1/news/24582-1.html
See also ebXML References: http://xml.coverpages.org/ebXML.html