Re: OFF TOPIC RESPONSE to Re: Reliable Messaging Spec v0-078

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

Message text written by Jim Hughes
>>FYI - I've had e-mail exchanges over the past 6 months with Satish and
David
>Turner at Microsoft regarding  interoperability and/or convergence of the
two
>efforts, but there has been no progress. The next best hope for building 
>synergy
>between the two initiatives will occur within the W3C XML Protocol
Activity
>(W3C/XP). I'll be representing ebXML at an upcoming meeting of the W3C/XP
and
>will try to keep the ebXML group as informed as possible of W3C/XP
activities.
><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Dick,

This is definately a worthy endeavour.  But - part of the answer is also
IBM and Bob Sutor.  I'm not sure Bob Sutor 'gets it' yet either.

Here we have three initatives - ebXML, UDDI and W3C/XP that Bob Sutor
is personally promoting and focusing IBM's resources at.

What are we missing here?  For starters the 'big picture' plan!!!

Now here's what I've been able to distill over the past couple of
weeks - and what I've been trying to do is orientate around this,
because with a road-map everyone can understand the boundaries
and work collaboratively much more effectively (like not reinventing
each others wheels):

1) ebXML - focus - business process enablement, 
     with global interoperable XML based business transactions as goal.

2) UDDI - focus - directories of services and trading partners, with
     netmarket facilitation as goal.

3) W3C/XP - focus - development of SOAP specification - goal
     interoperablity of middleware and transport platforms.

4) Biztalk - focus -  message management services and routing - 
      goal - provide "EDI VAN" style services through WIN2000 platform
      and provide VB programmers a pipeline service for exchanging
      business content as BOD's using XML.

5) CORBA/OMG  - focus - object based development environment - 
     goal - promote object services for business application deployment.

If MS and IBM (and Sun) can sign up to the roadmap - then we will
all find this alot easier.   Trouble is when you read the press releases
you get all kinds of double-speak and marketing overlay - that is just
totally confusing.

Now that W3C is standardizing SOAP - does this mean that since
ebXML is trying to conform to W3C whereever it makes sense, that
we can see that SOAP will be a supported transport layer for ebXML?

Thoughts?

DW.
======================  W3C / XP puzzle ==========================
"W3C Is Moving Aggressively on SOAP"
A project by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to standardize
the SOAP specification submitted by IBM this spring is under way.
SOAP is an XML-based cross-platform device that developers can
use to write programs that can communicate with applications . . .
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2000-2/0922f.html#item12
<

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20000921S0026