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Michael,
So many interesting things to pick out of your email to talk about.
On Fri, 1 Apr 2005 10:15 pm, Michael Champion wrote:
> The ideas that excite me involve
> (surprise, surprise) XML-capable DBMS to do the heavy lifting for
> transactions, reliability, authentication/access control, and
> interfacing to the legacy infrastucture.
Any further comments?
This is definitely an interesting area for me also.
Probably a decade or two ago, just firing off a transaction and getting it
processed on a messaging server was an exciting thing.
At that time, most of the messaging servers were file based. Certainly not
tied to an rdms. Then, a few companies started putting their messaging
systems ontop of a dbms and things got (theoritically) better.
And then came the internet, and the web, and imo suddenly caput.
Maybe we got overtaken by the 3D games .... I've never understood the idea to
stick a graphics card in a computer.. it just seems so wrong... :-)
A few years back I put a lot of time and effort into ebxml hoping that it
would take on the 'heavy lifting' tasks that you mentioned.
In the market place, it turned out that it's very hard to make money from it.
I found ebxml had a lot of lock-out and so how can you do it if everybody is
locked out because they are 'not ebxml-compatible'. It has become a very
small club now in any case. Maybe only for the rich and famous...
Another factor is that big companies look at transactions substantially
differently than small companies. Bigger companies don't mind a server room
with lots of stuff going on.
As someone with more ideas than resources, and more time than sense
we built a shrinkwrapped accounting system based on xml.
So what happens is that the user does their accounting as per normal except
what happens is that the data goes into xml documents rather than the
traditional rdbms that we all used to be writing ten or fifteen years ago.
The xml documents then go into an sql database in a format similar to what we
are used to in a traditional messaging system.
Then the idea is, that the small business, has all these xml documents
that are perfectly ready to send. Because they were created that way (in xml)
in the first place.
It's surprising, even though there are a lot of off-the-shelf accounting
packages sold, just how many small companies don't have a super strong
allegiance to their current product. ie they are prepared to swap to
something else.
This is just small chat. Proving that xml accounting systems work is not as
easy as you might think. I can assure you that small businesses are not very
forgiving when it comes to software. Nice idea... easy programming... hard
reality...
Everything has to be just right or they tend to throw the whole thing in the
can. Not like in a big business where you can get an extra $50k to keep
working on it... someone ticks the box and on it goes...
It's interesting to see that in the last five years, we haven't seen any major
progress in interoperability in the smaller accounting systems.
It's obvious that there is significant structural work in the areas that you
describe that still needs to be done.....
David
--
Computergrid : The ones with the most connections win.
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