RE: update on Versatile B2B gateway

["Pim van der Eijk" <pim.vandereijk@oasis-open.org>]

Title: update on Versatile B2B gateway

Hello Jacques,

 

This document was mentioned on the call yesterday, and I remembered I hadn't provided feedback to it yet.

 

First of all, I think it is a really good document, which I think should be posted, when final, on the ebXML.org site (I'll check with my colleagues).  There is a recently updated OASIS template for white papers you could use for it. 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/templates/ 

 

Some other comments:

Page 2, when a message is not a service invocation.

Implicit in the first bullet where you mention BPM, the message may be just a way to transport e.g. documents intended for human consumption.  There may be a mapping from ebMS header fields RefToMessageId and ConversationId to workflow processes or to route the document to the responsible employee.  There are actual projects using ebXML for this, e.g. in eGovernment to reduce paper-based processing.

 

Page 4 and Figure 1 on page 5, these mention ebMSv3.  The current OASIS/ISO 15000-2 Standard offers many of the same benefits, and its security and reliability features (while further updated in some WS specifications) are quite stable and reliable.  It is good to mention the added features of ebMSv3, but I would suggest you talk about ebMS (without version number) in the general text. I am a bit concerned that people may interpret this as saying there is no (longer any) value in ebMS2 today, which isn't true and may upset some people that actually use it today.  This comment applies to other figures.

 

Perhaps this and other diagrams should also explicitly indicate that within the enterprise SOAP requests are just one way of connecting to backend systems (JMS, MQ, Tib/Rendezvous etc.). This is implicit in later references to integration brokers.

 

Page 5, this suggests WS-Addressing is effectively a prerequisite to support this pattern, which seems too strong (it is useful, but couldn't the functionality described be achieved using more convential methods?).

 

As a more general comment, the document is mainly focussed on the connectivity and decoupling features of the B2B gateway. It does not discuss trading configuration, partner management, activity monitoring and business process (choreography) support.  But perhaps those deserve separate white papers ...

 

I hope you find these comments useful.

 

Best regards,

 

Pim van der Eijk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since there will be quite some time until ebMS

I would suggest you mention In figure  

 

 

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From: Jacques Durand [mailto:JDurand@us.fujitsu.com]
Sent: 08 December 2005 02:37
To: 'Monica J Martin'; Breininger, Kathryn R; Ian Jones
Cc: 'Pim van der Eijk'
Subject: update on Versatile B2B gateway

An update of the previous "Versatile B2B gateway" SOA design pattern draft, that was submitted to ebSOA TC.
- The "synchronous WS request-response" case was added as one of the cases for Fig 2.
- Fig 3 was remodeled to show the document exchanges and its back-end binding to be appropriate in case of business processes.

Jacques