Virtual Supply Chains: Just Add Java?

New proof-of-concept from Sun promotes plug-and-play for electronic marketplaces

There’s no longer any convincing objection to the idea that independent trade exchanges and extensible markup language (XML) will largely supplant formal supply chains and electronic data interchange (EDI). But although open, flexible, quickly created e-business exchanges are preferable in principle to rigid, labor-intensive supply-chain links, that principle has not yet crystallized into common practices.

The most common solutions for linking large enterprises for automated buying and selling will inevitably be extensible, scalable, and platform independent. Of course, platform independence is the domain Java exemplifies. It’s therefore not surprising that Java creator Sun Microsystems is cooking up ideas about how to interconnect the business-to-business (B2B) world.

Sun presented a proof of concept at this year’s JavaOne called B2B Messenger that it hopes will eventually provide a relatively simple-to-use messaging component that helps link participants in B2B exchanges. According to Farrukh Najmi, staff engineer at Sun, the essence of this project is to “demonstrate how you can have open B2B connectivity between Java2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)-based systems and their heterogeneous partners,” heterogeneous being the operative word. Its role, Najmi says, is to “enable reliable XML messaging between partners.” Indeed, the convergence of Java and XML was a pervasive theme at the conference.

HighTechMatrix, a B2B marketplace hosted by i2 Technologies Inc., is cooperating with Sun on the project, testing the idea’s viability and providing feedback for improvements. Sun is designing B2B Messenger to work with any independent trade exchange (ITE) host, or even between supply-chain partners in the absence of an external trade platform — not just with HighTechMatrix.

The idea is that each exchange host could create a plugin to translate users’ messages to an appropriate format. However, unmediated supply-chain partners could also write their own plugins, using a toolkit, in order to link up directly and independently of hosted B2B marketplaces. Such an arrangement would still be more easy to build than an EDI-based relationship.

EDI owes its rigidity to the laborious negotiations between supply-chain partners about data definitions and other details pertinent to automating procurement. With a simpler way to message contextually meaningful data — such as requests for bids, purchase orders, and invoices — to an essentially unlimited number of supply-chain partners, a customer organization can base its purchasing decisions on price and availability instead of cost of doing business.

Related to a Java specification request (JSR) called Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM), the work on B2B Messenger is part of a visibly growing interconnection between XML and Java — the metadata and programming stars, respectively, of the platform-independent scene. (A Java API for XML Parsing, or JAXP, is a related JSR in the works.) — Jeanette Burriesci