EDI in linux (everone PLEASE read)

[Douglas J Hunley]

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Ben Duncan spewed electrons into the ether that resembled:
> Although everone has a favorite language. when designing such a
> system, one must compare cababilties,
> ease of programming, acceptance, and extensiability.

nobody said you had to keep the same language for all pieces of the EDI 
toolkit. There's no reason you couldn't use Perl for the incoming/outgoing 
daemons and C for the translator... Just a thought.
I tend to agree that Perl would be a good choice, as it does string manips 
well, and can be daemonized easily.

Howeever, have you seen REBOL?

I think you might be impressed with it's abilities. (you too peck)

whatever language you settle on must also have a database abstraction layer. 
One things I *hated* about Gentran was the way it tied to Oracle or Sybase 
directly. An "open" product should be able to plug-in mysql, oracle, sybase, 
postgres, ODBC-compliant anything. without any code changes.
also, the trading partner records should probably be in XML format. what kind 
of reporting engine will you be using? EDI is useless without stats. the 
first time someone submits a 148 and it gets rejected, they need to be able 
to tell the claims processor why.
and most state agencies (and companies now) want to know which of their 
trading partners can't get their data right. I know from experience (working 
on the project) the OHIO BWC will fine you for poor data (excessive).

have you given thought to how the trading partners will communicate? 
pgp-encrypted email? pgp-encrypted XML messages with edi embedded in them? 
there is a EDI-specific email standard. will you support it? and what about 
talking to a VAN? Sterling, AT&T, and IBM all have very different interfaces 
into their VAN. would your software allow you to be a van?
- -- 
Douglas J Hunley (doug at hunley.homeip.net) - Linux User #174778
Admin: Linux StepByStep - http://www.linux-sxs.org
	and http://jobs.linux-sxs.org

I can see your point, but I still think you're full of 
crap.
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