QLM Messaging Standards: Introduction and Comparison with Existing Messaging Protocols

摘要

Recent advancement in web technology enabled the development of new Business-to-Business (B2B) infrastructures, e.g. based on the concept of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). These infrastructures enable seamless information exchange among different stakeholders and complex business procedures. However, there is still a lack of sufficiently generic and standardized application-level interfaces for exchanging the kind of information required by such infrastructures. These interfaces must be as complete and flexible as possible to support changing organization needs and structures. Their development is an essential step to design future SOA services and to enhance product life-cycle management. The Quantum Lifecycle Management (QLM) messaging standards are proposed as a standard application-level interface that would fulfil such requirements. This standard is introduced in this paper and compared to existing ones. Several real-life implementations are presented to show why such messaging standards are needed and how flexible QLM messaging standards are.