Re: Business Service Interface

[Martin W Sachs/Watson/IBM <mwsachs@us.ibm.com>]

Stefano,

Your Business Service Interface is a very good description of the needed
B2B middleware, or what the TRP team has been referring to as the
application services layer.  It is also a very good description of my IBM
team's proof of concept prototype, BPF.  I have attached below some slides
on BPF. Note especially the list of BPF functions on the first slide after
the cover.

I have a few comments on your writeup:

The BSI is highly desirable for new ebXML-aware applications as well as for
legacy applications.  The reason is that most of its functions provide
essential services even to new applications.

IDEAS TO BE DEVELOPED (page 7):

The BSI should provide essential conversation-based services. The actual
start and end of a conversation are application-dependent, so the BSI's
interface to the application should provide for indicating start and end of
conversation.  See the IBM tpaML proposal for discussions of the
conversation.

A given BSI should definitely support concurrent conversations as a
performance enhancement. An alternative view is that a BSI is an
instantiation of one conversation and a B2B server should be able to run
many BSI's concurrent.  In that case, starting a conversation invokes a new
BSI.

I prefer that a conversation always be started by an API call from the
application.

Maintaining the conversation state is an essential service of the BSI.  It
can maintain the state in a conventional database.

Regards,
Marty

(See attached file: bpf.pdf)

*************************************************************************************

Martin W. Sachs
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
P. O. B. 704
Yorktown Hts, NY 10598
914-784-7287;  IBM tie line 863-7287
Notes address:  Martin W Sachs/Watson/IBM
Internet address:  mwsachs @ us.ibm.com
*************************************************************************************



Stefano POGLIANI <stefano.pogliani@sun.com> on 10/18/2000 09:15:53 AM

Please respond to stefano.pogliani@sun.com

To:   ebxml-tp@lists.ebxml.org
cc:
Subject:  Business Service Interface




I have started to  collect some ideas on the Business Service Interface
(BSI).
These ideas were  mainly derived from some thoughts I had on this subject
and from the discussions  during the f2f last week.
At the moment,  please consider this as a contribution to the discussion.

Attached, find a  word document with two gifs for the pictures.

Best  regards

/Stefano

=?iso-8859-1?Q?bpf.pdf?=