Project JebX: a Java ebXML experience

EbXML is an emerging and ambitious B2B e-commerce standard with the potential to become a significant player in the next few years. We conducted a hands-on evaluation of an early release ebXML product in order to gauge the availability, maturity and utility of ebXML solutions, develop experience with ebXML development, and formulate preliminary ebXML product evaluation criteria. A B2B ebXML application was defined, but after a sustained effort to implement it a fully functional test application eluded us. The strengths of the product being evaluated exacerbated the development problems, as it presented a high-level business process view, making low-level debugging of business logic interfaces and messaging services intractable. Our experience so far of ebXML is that it is slow - slow to be understood by the e-commerce community, slow to be taken up by vendors and end users, slow to develop and debug, and slow to execute.