Building B2B Applications with XML

With the huge potential of business-to-business (B2B) commerce over the Internet, reaching perhaps into the trillions of dollars in the first few years of the 21st century, it is no surprise that lots of companies are offering B2B software solutions, all under-girded by Extensible Markup Language (XML), for the exchange of trading partner agreements, purchase orders, catalog data, and other business documents. Building B2B Applications with XML: A Resource Guide shows how you can build your own B2B exchange system using freely available resources.

The basic steps you must take to build a B2B application are listed here, along with the chapters that discuss the step:

• Select a B2B-related XML vocabulary, such as xCBL, cXML, or RosettaNet, or create your own vocabulary. See Chapters 5 through 9.
• Create XML documents using an editor, XML Spy for example. You can also use a text editor.
• Choose a unique naming scheme for your documents, such as a scheme based on ISO 8601 dates combined with a random number, such as 2001-01-01-9873-order.xml, for example. See Chapter 3.
• If privacy and secrecy are important to your business transactions, before moving files to a business partner's site, encrypt and/or digitally sign the documents using something like PGP. See Chapter 4.
• Transport the files, such as by using the HTTP GET method to pull a document from a site or HTTP PUT to push a document to a site. See Chapter 3.
• When a document is received at a partner's site, you should send a receipt message, verifying the document's safe arrival. This could be accomplished with a script written in JavaScript, ASP, or PHP, for example.
• Once received, the appropriate data must be extracted from the document. This could be accomplished with XSLT, for example. XSLT is discussed in Chapter 2.
• Log and track your document activities. You can see an example of this in Chapter 10.