Interaction protocol for managing cross company processes among network-distributed applications

摘要

A general purpose application interaction protocol, referred to herein as the Commerce Exchange Interaction Protocol (CXIP), governs the exchange of data between applications resident in computers in a distributed network such as the Internet, providing for application interoperability. CXIP enables process communications among network-distributed software applications, particularly, but not exclusively, among software applications having dissimilar platforms, language dependencies or vendor dependencies. Data structures, object and method invocation requests are exchanged between applications by means of XML documents based on CXIP semantics. The application interaction protocol, which is not specific to any particular functional domain and specifies interactions that are independent of transactional content, includes four component parts: message formats, message types, exchange semantics and transportation assumptions. CXIP-based interactions use TCP/IP as their underlying transport mechanism, although CXIP may be implemented using SMTP or FTP, or on top of any other standard application-layer protocol, including HTTP.