Re: FW: FW: [ubl-dev] looking for practical examples

[Alexander Whillas <whillas@gmail.com>]

Fulton,

Thank you for your reply. I guess we did start on the wrong foot as
you early on made the assumption that I was writing a inventory system
and I should have corrected this slight before it blossomed into a
mangrove of details. To frame the problem again and restate my
original "Use Case":

I have been commissioned to join two existing systems via a TEXT file.
The systems are:

(A) A legacy, proprietary, inventory system written in Cobol.
(B) An OpenSource eCommerce (Ubercart) systems based on the popular
Drupal CMS system

I have _not_ written system A, but(!) have been charged by it author
to develop a perception for the format of the said TEXT file. I _have_
written the inventory API for system B which defers all "business
logic" to an external inventory system (see A) and uses a single
figure (i.e. 'Quantity in Stock', more of a tally than anything else)
to determine weather an item can be purchases or not at any given
time.

My previous education in Computing Science and exposure to the "hype"
of XML during its early inception into the large programming
community, made me choose XML as _the_ format for said TEXT file.
Having also been subjected to long, semi-religious, Standardists
articles on graces of using Standards wherever possible in the web
development sphere and so I found UBL and this email list.

The inventory system is going to not only send me stock levels of all
products for one of 4 warehouse locations but also complete (as much
as the eCommerce system needs) Product descriptions. In return the
eCommerce system will send back complete order descriptions (in order
to dispatch the goods and adjust it master stock level records)
including Customer information.

So, does this fall within the scope/domain of UBL 2.0 or is it an
unreasonable Use Case and I'm better off starting from scratch?

The answer, from the length debates in this thread, and from my own
research, seems to be a defiant "maybe" if I put in more than I'm
likely to get back at this point in history, BUT if I invest in UBL
the future might offer some returns if others also feel the same way.

I was then take-a-back at:
1. the immensity of the UBL 2.0 specification,
2. the lack of any apparent guild to comprehend it (save for the good
work of Crane Softwrights Ltd., but still nothing like anything the
W3C publish),
3. almost complete lack of web presence or penetration of online
communities given its age/"maturity" (which makes me fear for my time
investment).

I voiced my opinion, as I'm used to doing since I engaging with online
communities, about how to tackle issue 1, and perhaps if 2 were
developed to the level of W3C standard then 3 might also be solved.

I have conceded to develop my own document for the above stated
problem but only using the base UBL Libraries in the hope that it will
be UBL "compatible" while conceding it will not be "compliant". I hope
others in similar situation to my own, coming to UBL will learn from
the mail archive of this list and save themselves some time.

with complements

A R B Whillas BsCS