RE: initial draft of CPP-CPA Specification

[Bob Haugen <linkage@interaccess.com>]

>MWS:  Everyone has a different view of what an application is.  
>There were a lot of discussions of this in the Boston meeting.  
>I intended "business-applications functions" as a broad term 
>encompassing both what you are calling the back-end functions
>and the CPA-aware parts of the application.  I see that I will have 
>to review this question.

I think this and several other related questions will never be clarified
until we get an agreed-upon ebXML protocol stack.  Scott Hinkelman
and Jim Clark have recently (last month) posted attempts to define
such, and there were bunches of diagrams on whiteboards in Boston
with the same goal.  

My own view is that there will be different protocol layers for (at least):
Message Service
Business Service Interface
Business Transaction
Business Collaboration
EAI
"Internal" business app.

I include the last two not because they are parts of ebXML 
(although I think hooks would be useful, as in Stefano's 
BSI proposal), but because lots of people within ebXML
seem to think that internal business apps will handle
everything beyond the transport layer (which they almost
certainly won't, unless they were designed with ebXML
in mind).

Respectfully,
Bob Haugen