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Enable real-world trading partner collaborations in SOA

An introduction to the ebXML Collaboration Protocol Profile and Agreement standard

By Leo Fernandez, Ash Parikh and Varun Gupta, JavaWorld.com, 08/14/06

XML and SOAP have opened the gates for e-business communication in the purest sense by allowing applications to truly interoperate. But they have proved insufficient in enabling a global electronic marketplace and making available information about the following key elements of a global e-business infrastructure:

• Business taxonomies
• Partners' message-exchange capabilities
• Partners' business-collaboration support

A global e-business infrastructure today is composed of a complex web of transactions and information exchanges among several diverse organizations. Each organization interacts in a unique way with another organization, introducing severe complexity for enabling this information exchange in an efficient and secure manner.

The two key standards that strive to overcome this challenge are Universal Discovery, Description, and Integration (UDDI) and Electronic Business using Extensible Markup Language (ebXML), both managed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). Both paradigms support the notion of the discovery of a business service provider, its Web services, and the available technical interfaces. However, while UDDI focuses more on the discovery of business service providers and their services, ebXML focuses on both the discovery and the collaboration of business service providers, as well as the discovery of their respective services.

This article concentrates on the ebXML implementation foundation, which is made up of four components: messaging, collaboration profiles, business process, and metadata registry.

The ebXML Collaboration Protocol Profile and Agreement (CPPA) standard plays a key role in an ebXML registry by providing a mechanism for specifying the details of how to support B2B integrations. It includes the details for transport, messaging, and security constraints and also specifies the bindings to a business-process specification document, which defines the business interactions between two partners. This bottom-up approach of including the business stakeholder in an integration right from the start enables any business entity to build a scalable and flexible system, ensuring information exchange occurs seamlessly. According to the specification:

"the objective of this specification is to ensure interoperability between two Parties even though they MAY procure application software and runtime support software from different vendors. The CPP [Collaboration Protocol Profile] defines a Party's Message-exchange capabilities and the Business Collaborations that it supports. The CPA [Collaboration Protocol Agreement] defines the way two Parties will interact in performing the chosen Business Collaborations. Both Parties SHALL use identical copies of the CPA to configure their run-time systems. This assures that they are compatibly configured to exchange Messages whether or not they have obtained their run-time systems from the same vendor. The configuration process MAY be automated by means of a suitable tool that reads the CPA and performs the configuration process."

This article will also showcase the advantage of using a flexible and high-performance native XML database management system along with XQuery to enable rapid and evolving loosely-coupled collaborations among trading partners within and across enterprises.