Jeff Ricker

Electronic commerce isn't new - more than 300,000 of the largest companies worldwide exchange electronic trade documents every day. XML-based Internet commerce can't simply ignore this realm. According to Munro's Law, "The value of an e-commerce solution is exponentially proportional to the number of companies that use it." If we apply this rule, EDI (electronic data interchange) dwarfs the entire combined volume of XML e-commerce - which is why a viable XML-EDI solution is critical to the success of XML e-commerce as a whole. This column will discuss XEDI, an approach to representing EDI in XML syntax. In this issue I'll provide what I hope will be a compelling introduction to XEDI. In subsequent issues I'll provide more details on EDI and programming with XEDI. When the XEDI working group began looking at the problem of EDI to XML, we quickly realized that the ch... (more)