Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Common Combinations for Security, Transport, and Packaging

The biggest news in this area in the last part of 2002 was that Wal-Mart decided to move from doing direct dial-up for EDI to Internet-based transport using the EDI over the Internet (EDIINT) standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). There are two flavors of EDIINT, one based on SMTP (called AS1 for Applicability Statement 1) and the other based on HTTP (called AS2). Both use S/MIME. Wal-Mart is requiring that its vendors use AS2. Notice two important things about this development: (1) the choice of the relatively mature EDIINT using S/MIME for packaging and encryption, and (2) the decision to still use EDI and not XML. EDIINT can be used for payloads other than ...