RE: EDI over http?

["Carl Hage" <carl@xxxxxxxxx>]

> From:          Rik Drummond <drummond@xxxxxxxxxx>

> IMAP4 allows submission and retrieval of messages/transactions between a client and a server...... so a two way exchange between two companies will look like this.
> 
> 
> 	Company1		 		Company 2
> 	-----------------				------------------
> EDI Translator--imap4 client    ------->  	imap4 server--EDI Translator
> EDI Translator--imap4 server   <------- 	Imap4 client-- EDI Translator
> 
> what is wrong with that?

Sending email uses SMTP, retrieving email from a mailbox uses IMAP. 
IMAP has no value over SMTP except for off-line users that need a 
mailbox to hold messages while offline.

Many ISPs can still queue messages and deliver to offline users via 
SMTP, but there needs to be a special trick to "kick" the ISP's SMTP 
server to deliver queued messages after the connection is 
established.

The purpose of IMAP is to manipulate remote mailbox files, e.g. you 
can scan messages, and selectively download, move, or delete them. 
For EDI it seems like you probably want to download everything, so 
selective download doesn't seem that important. I suppose IMAP could 
save backup copies, but there are probably better ways of managing 
backups.

Is there a need to allow selective download (receipt) of messages? I 
suppose there is some advantage in downloading messages in sequence 
number order by customer, but it might be just as easy to queue them 
locally to reorder for processing.

I guess I don't see the value of using IMAP. What does it give you 
that plain SMTP doesn't? (Other than for offline mailboxes.) I 
suppose you could kludge the upload to a mailbox as sending a 
message, but this seems way more complex than the "standard" SMTP.

I suppose a vendor might want to scan RFQs, but it seems that NNTP, 
FTP, or HTTP would be better.

NNTP (usenet news) would be an ideal way to exchange messages amongst 
an industry trading group, where RFQs, etc. get broadcast to multiple 
recipients. An NNTP network would provide a highly reliable, 
redundant, distributed message exchange that could use AS1 directly 
for 1-many message distributions like RFQs.

For scanning archives of PRICATs, etc. HTTP is probably best. The 
specifics of mapping messages into files is specific to the 
transaction type, e.g. PRICAT messages might be stored different than 
others. Each industry group might use different methods.
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Carl Hage                                              C. Hage Associates
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<http://www.chage.com/chage/>                          Sunnyvale, CA 94086