Telematique, water and fire.

Cloud Based Integration Standards and B2B Messaging

Over the years during which I've tracked electronic document interchange, the realm of B2B messaging has often seemed one or two steps behind the times. The earliest adoption of document interchange standards for EDI like ANSI's X12 (now known as ASC X12), and the huge number of industry-specific messages, formats and transaction schemes that grew out of that adoption, has put business messaging in a position of always having to deal with legacy. This became increasingly evident in the late 1990s, with the explosion of the internet as a conduit for B2B messaging. The response by industry was the emergence of intermediation and conversion technologies, interchange services that provided as close to 'on-the-fly' translation and interpretation services as could be mustered.

The emergence of cloud computing is now an impetus to revisit B2B application messaging. I encountered this interesting post by Mark Morley of GSX.

…With so much interest in everything Cloud at the moment, companies are starting to look at ways of not only deploying enterprise applications up to a cloud based environment but also looking for ways to provide integration to other cloud based services, whether they are private or public clouds. AS4, with its web services capabilities has the potential to become the cloud based communications standard moving forwards.

AS4 is quite similar to AS2 in many ways however it operates within a web services context and unlike AS2, AS4 has enhanced interaction patterns and acknowledgement receipts. AS4 has the following characteristics:

• Provides acknowledgement receipts thus enabling reliable message delivery and retry in the event of a lost message
• Provides password authentication, digital signatures and encryption , confirms authenticity of the sender and ensures that the message is unaltered whilst in transit
• Offers large file compression and transfer support
• Error generation, reports any errors to the message sender of the message receiver
• Message exchange patterns, allows a rich variety of interactions between the sender and receiver

AS4 refers to Secure B2B Document Exchange Using Web Services is a standard developed by a subcommittee of the OASIS ebXML Messaging Services Technical Committee. For a good summary of the standard and the intent of the OASIS ebXML technical committee, take a look at The Drummond Group's site here. For those who might need a teaser:

This profile (of the ebMS 3.0 specification) provides guidance for a standardized methodology for the secure and document-agnostic exchange of B2B payloads using Web services. By constraining the ebMS v3.0 specification and the underlying WS-* specifications for messaging packaging, transport, security, and business non-repudiation, the profile focuses on providing an entry-level on-ramp for Web services B2B messaging. The end goal of this profile development is to replicate and strategically extend the existing functional requirements currently satisfied by RFC4130 (AS2) by mapping those requirements onto the Web services platform.

So, what's this got to do with cloud? Doesn't seem to be much more than a consideration of how to use Service Oriented Architecture principles and accepted practice as the basis for machine-to-machine business messaging. Yes, this all about web services. But, as Lori MacVittie points out in Let's Face It: PaaS is Just SOA for Platforms Without the Baggage, clouds are service-based models. They are Service Oriented Architecture that's "… merely moved down the stack a bit, into the underlying and foundational technologies upon which applications are built." In short, Lori considers the emergence of cloud computing and '-as-a-Service' approaches to be a do-over … the reduction and avoidance of the complexity that the industry loaded on itself in the early days by over-architecting and over specifying.

For the sake of the industries that depend on application-to-application business messaging, let's hope that the OASIS takes the hint.

[This was originally posted on Cumulations .]

Introducing Telematica's New Website, and My New Blog

Over the course of the next week, I will be moving the majority of my professional blogging to the new website for Telematica. As many of you know, I've re-established the consulting practice of Telematica, and over the past year have focused my energies on cloud computing, its infrastructure and platforms, as well as the requirements for an 'intercloud' -- the analog and moral equivalent of the 'internet' which permitted reliable interworking and interoperation of heterogeneous networks which are individually managed, administered and operated.

Telematica's consulting practice reflects this emphasis in the technology realms, and adds to it my strongly held view that service oriented systems (whether built on the principles of SOA or on the basis of the most modern cloud technologies) approach to 'composed' offers, demands an appreciation and perhaps a dependence on strategic operating relationships. The combination of cloud technologies and business development seems a natural to me, and they will be the fundament of Telematica's practice.

For the foreseeable future, I will be blogging on Cumulations, the blog of Telematica. I may to cross-post or double-post some of the industry-oriented entries on both Cumulations and Telematique for a short while. I'll continue to use Telematique as a place for the more speciulative, the more personal and the more far ranging sets of interest with which I'm afflicted. I look forward to seeing a few of you on the new site, and hope to finally get back into the writing I find so difficult to do, but so rewarding when I make it happen.

Moving along with Squarespace

It was with some real trepidation that I took on the job I've been putting off for so long … reinstating a website for Telematica, and then the job of setting up an associated blog from which I would not run screaming when I had the urge to write. After wrestling with Typepad for two days, only to emerge with a mediocre result on the blog and an unmanageable construction for the website, I came to the conclusion last night that I was facing the inevitable -- learning Wordpress and going off to eLance to find someone who, for a price, would pull it all together and convert the old blog.

While listening to NPR's RadioLab during a bout of insomnia last night, I noticed that one of their supporters (aka advertising sponsor) is Squarespace. Before I dozed off, I grabbed the iPhone and made a note to check it out. This morning, after 45 minutes reading their materials and watching a few of the video tutorials, it looked like it might be worth a try.

On both counts -- setting up a website and a blog -- Squarespace has made this a pleasant experience. I've been able to easily import a couple dozen blog posts from the past year into the new blog. (I really have NOT been writing. ) I like the way this is starting to look, and with any luck I'll have the website and new blog ready to turn up tomorrow evening. So far, so good.

Getting ready.

After way too long, I've taken time over the holiday to put the Telematica.com / Cumulati website together, as well as refreshed the Telematique blog site. In the course of doing this long overdue housekeeping, I actually (re-)discovered a couple of blogsites that I put together over the years on Blogger and Posterous.

I'm not yet sure that I'm satisfied with the 'coordinated' look for the blog and the website. I'll give it a week, and then make the decision as to whether it's not time to abandon Typepad altogether, move the blog and the website (?) to WordPress. Or, do I bite the bullet and host the website using a CMS like Joomla or Drupal?

Any suggestions?

What I need is an iPad client for Typepad

I admit to the fact that I haven't done much to keep the blog fresh. Face it... I've been concerned about being just another voice in the cloud computing echo chamber. (That's the grist for a separate post, and much too self-reflective for this crankygram.) But I will also stipulate that since starting with the iPad, I have had the urge to blog, but have found it to be a pain because of two technical shortcomings.

First,when I encounter a tweet, blog post or some piece of web content that stirs my imagination, the nuisance factor of leaving the iPad app, initializing the browser bookmark or app by which to craft the blog post, and then returning to my initial stream of work is just ridiculous. But, I have seen the future... iOS4 on the iPhone makes clear what can be done to bounce between apps without too much loss of context. So, that brings us to the second failing.

TypePad post creating, editing and management ... There's NOT an app for that. At least, not on the iPad. The rather dated iPhone app can be fired up on an iPad, and might be of some value if it were a true universal app... But it's not.

So, the alternative means is what I am doing now.... Using the web-based editor on the TypePad.com site, using the Safari browser which really sucks when trying to use the WYSIWYG editor. It can't. Not really. For example, right now I'm trying to scroll back up to the beginning of this post. #TypePadeditorFail. My only option is to use their Lite Editor. Gaak.

So, it is with some hope and an optimistic point of view that I look forward to the arrival of iOS4 for the iPad, and with less optimism that TypePad (or some brave third party) will provide a decent TypePad blogging & blog management app. Kthxbye.