B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

268 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
data. They have to enable A2A (application-to-application), B2B
(business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) integration,
thereby eliminating the need for an individual software solution for
each type of integration.
For small to medium size organizations that do not have the resources
to implement advanced B2B systems, integration brokers should provide
functionality for rapidly developing B2B portals to enable Web-based
participation in business processes.
9.4.2. Web services
Integration brokers should provide the ability to create, test, deploy,
publish and manage Web services and subscribe to a business partner's
Web services as an out-of-the-box solution. This would enable the
enterprises to quickly convert the existing applications into Web
services.
9.4.3. Interoperability
Integration brokers should provide seamless interoperability with existing
applications, irrespective of the programming language (such as Java,
C, C++ and COBOL) in which they were developed and the platform
(such as Windows, Unix and Mainframe) they run on.
9.4.4. Open architecture
Integration brokers should provide open, non-invasive and scalable
architectures that support all the leading distributed computing
architectures such as COM+, CORBA and J2EE.
9.4.5. Support for all communication protocols
Integration brokers should provide support for all the protocols of
transmitting data for B2B application integration (see Figure 9.9). Some
of the most commonly used communication protocols include FTP,
HTTP, HTTPS, EDI, e-mails (POP, SMTP), WAP, SNA and TCP/IP.