Tuesday, July 17, 2007

B2B: open source AS2

Within the open source community, there is a strong interest in integration technology: JMS implementations, Web Services frameworks, ESB's... But there is very limited interest in B2B. There are e.g. (almost) no open source implementations of RosettaNet RNIF or EDIINT AS2 .

One notable exception was the freebxml project with Hermes. Hermes is an open source implementation of the ebXML ebMS 2.0 protocol. The development was started quite a while and was mainly done in Hong Kong.

But recently, things have started moving wrt. EDIINT AS2. Hermes now also provides support for AS2. And 2 other projects have delivered implementation of the AS2 protocol: m-e-c AS2 and OpenAS2 .

Some time ago, I had to implement and test the commercial Seeburger AS2 adapterin a SAP XI environment. To do some initial testing and experimenting, I used m-e-c AS2 as the AS2 software of my fictitious business partner.

The m-e-c AS2 software worked quite OK, although I ran into some incompatibilities . It would be most interesting to do see the results of other compatibility testing for these open source AS2 implementations.

Anyway, a very interesting evolution to see all these open source AS2 implementations pop-up. Congratulations to all the committers!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Javier Eduardo said...

Hello. Sorry to find your blog so late. I share your thoughts on the opensource for AS2. I think it's become darksided due to the AS2 certification thing; though very few people comment on it because they are able to sell software at very high prices, which is stupid, because there are hundreds thousands small companies who can not afford that but are willing to pay up to 500 usd for an Open Source software which involves some installation services, training or customizing. I have a perl development (https://sourceforge.net/projects/as2openssl/), actually very small but I would like to invite you to help finishing whatever is missing. I have troubles with WPG when I send. All is successful when receiving. The readme file inside will give you the status of the script. Please reply to me through sourceforge and I will be back to you to comment on the project. Kind Regards. Javier