As a software company, Trade Ship is constantly evaluating where the intersection of technology and customer demands meet.  This is a dynamic undertaking considering that the software industry redefines cutting-edge in 18 months cycle and customers require the highest levels of productivity at all times.  To snapshot the industry now, it is evident that this intersection lies in browser-based, multi-platform systems.  The reasons are fairly obvious.

There is one undeniable truth left standing following the dot-com meltdown and that is that the Internet is a business tool.  It is a ubiquitous, low-cost, highly accessible network.  It is available to low-tech and high-tech alike, with global reach, unprecedented in many ways.  Browsers extended its utility by standardizing the way the world views its information.  They became an operating environment within an operating system, unleashing a world of technologists to target a single protocol/presentation pair: HTTP/HTML.

Businesses have taken advantage of this capability in many ways.  We see portals for communities to share information, self-service to provide customers any-time availability to demand service, online auctions to optimize on demand availability with point-in-time demand.  All these items have streamlined operations for the vendor and the customer.  Trade Ship has experienced them all.  The question begging to be answered is “What’s next?”

The answer, surprisingly, is fairly easy to answer, in two words:  Web Services.  If you look at what is common among all the successful features listed previously, you see it is the browser.  Browsers, by their nature, are designed to work with people.  This means that every transaction requires that some person to logon, read, enter information, wait for a response….  You get the picture.  Replace that person with a program and instead of getting one transaction per minute, you are getting hundreds or thousands.  Now you are talking about web services.  Web services use the same protocol, HTTP, as browsers do.  But, instead of HTML, they use XML, both of which share a common ancestry and work seamlessly with HTTP.

Trade Ship is well on its way in incorporating web services in its offerings.  We have developed a suite of message schemas that are based on XML.    This is a critical first step.  The schema defines the message payload and some high-level, or even detailed rules about itself.  If these rules are violated, the XML Document Object Model (DOM) will complain.  The DOM is another W3C recommendation.  It is a parser that doubles as an in memory container for the XML document.  The DOM provides a series of APIs that programmers use to traverse/explore the message.  The result is that any existing EDI message, or any new message an organization needs, can be described, automated and seamlessly transported around the world.

Although it will take some time for these standards to propagate throughout the industry, it is inevitable that it will happen.  It is best to be ahead, to understand how these new processes will emerge and how to handle them.