EDI in linux (everone PLEASE read)

[mpdickens]

My reasoning behind my interest in perl is not because it's my favortite
language: It's not. But, nothing handles strings, interfaces into as 
many RDBMS's, Daemonizes as well or understands as many markup languages 
as perl. As far as reporting engines go, Perl interfaces into every 
RDBMS that is worth having... Creating reports would be easy. Even with 
everything that I have said about Perl's abilities, I am not totally 
sold on it for edi. Regarding REBOL, I know knothing about it... I 
suppose I need to check it out. AFA COBAL goes, It was the 2nd language 
that I learned (Fortran was the first... Yes, I knew Fred Flintstone).
The things that COBAL does well, it does *exceeding* well.

The ability to interface into value added networks is a must. As a 
matter of fact, I have been talking to some people I know at various
large companies and they are interested enough in a open source edi
solution to contribute hardware, software and possibly even money. The
returns that they stand to gain from an open edi solution in terms of 
small and mid size trading partners is high. However, in order to get
them on the band wagon, we have to be able to present them with a hell
of a lot more than what we have now.

I think at this point, it is safe to say there is a lot of interest in 
open source edi. The next step is to figure out *exactly* what we want
open edi to do (And not do...), settle on some standards and get 
started. If you guy's are game, I'll get us a home on sourceforge so we 
can get started... Any takers...?...


Best


Peck