Subject: RE: Split within EDIINT: Multiple versions of AS2

From: "Gary Crough" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 12:33:34 -0700

Dick,
	This is starting to remind me of a Pro-Life vs Anti-Abortion debate.  No one is anti-life or pro-abortion.  
	I, along with everyone else, favor of a single EDIINT standard ... and am opposed to gravity!  But a single AS2 standard does NOT exist and gravity does.  I choose to face reality.  AS2(UCC) and AS2(GISB) are very different things using the same name.
	As you know, Dale M (and Terry H) participated on the GISB/HL7/EDIINT/AIAG convergence team ... their goal was to converge the various standards.  Over 3 years later the EDIINT task force is not much closer to converging GISB into the original AS2 than they were on day 1.  The two specifications were placed in a single document but little other "convergence" took place.  The differences between AS2(GISB) and AS2(S/MIME) are substantial.  So much so, that any vendor choosing to offer both would implement the two separately and allow trading partners to be configured to use one or the other.  That is how convergence is going to happen.  Do you disagree????
	
	The demand for secure Internet trading was such that it did not wait on the slow-moving EDIINT AS2 conversion effort.  Last year, several hundred AS2 installations went into the packaged goods, healthcare, financial and transportation industries.  In the packaged goods industry alone several thousand AS2 installations are anticipated this year.  In all cases these installations will be incompatible with hundreds of AS2 installations within the Energy industry and vice versa.  Why  pretend otherwise?
	
	Most interested parties are yet to be heard from.  The EDIINT workgroup has been quite for some time.  Let's give people a couple of weeks to wake up and chime in.  And there is now a more important interest group: users.  Maybe we can get some input from them.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Brooks [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 10:08 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: RE: Split within EDIINT: Multiple versions of AS2

It seems clear from the comments provided that Cyclone Software (represented
by Dale Moberg and Gary Crough) and Rik Drummond oppose a single AS2
standard for exchanging EDI/XML data.

On the other hand we've heard from Andrew Strickland, Mike Costa, Steve
Lowery, Wayne Mackintosh, and myself who appear in favor of developing a
single AS2 standard for exchanging EDI/XML data.

I believe we must resolve this issue before we can move on and address the
deeper technical issues.

Based on the comments provided thus far, there appears to be more support
behind developing a single AS2 standard. However we've only heard from a
relatively small subset of the EDIINT community.

I believe more community input is needed to help the EDIINT workgroup decide
how to proceed  - should the group develop one standard or multiple
standards to exchange EDI/XML data over HTTP?

Your opinions are important, please give the group the help it needs to make
the proper decision going forward.

Thanks,

Dick Brooks
Systrends, Inc
7855 South River Parkway, Suite 111
Tempe, Arizona 85284
Web: www.systrends.com <http://www.systrends.com>
Phone:480.756.6777,Mobile:602-684-1484,eFax:240-352-0714

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked]
[mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Gary Crough
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 1:09 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Split within EDIINT: Multiple versions of AS2

All,
	For some time now EDIINT has been split into AS1 and AS2.  These "subsets"
did not upset anyone.  Why the uproar over a suggestion to create another
subset?

	When UCC companies demand trading partners use EDIINT AS2 (and many do)
they mean the EDIINT "AS2" subset certified by the UCC ... AS2 using S/MIME
and compression options.  But within the energy industry "AS2" means
PGP/MIME not S/MIME.
	AS2 subsets already exist.  The Energy industry (> 100 installations) uses
one subset of EDIINT AS2 and the packaged goods, healthcare, financial, high
technology and transportation industries (> 1000 installations) uses
another; currently the two AS2 subsets are incompatible.  Pretending
otherwise is creating considerable confusion in the user community.

	Using Dale Moberg's proposed terms ...AS1, AS2 (UCC certified) and ASx (PGP
version): there is no reason a vendor can't support EDIINT AS1, AS2 and ASx.
Such a vendor could claim to support all major subsets of EDIINT.  Further,
such a vendor would create convergence ... enabling trading between
industries which standardized on different subsets.
	With clear subsets within the EDIINT specification, there is no requirement
for a small company like iSoft, the WalMart AS2 vendor, to support AS1 or
ASx since WalMart dictates UCC-certified AS2 interfaces.

Gary Crough
Cyclone Commerce, Inc.
8388 E. Hartford Drive, Scottsdale, AZ 85255
Office: 480-627-8780        Cell: 602-885-9010

---

From: "Dale Moberg" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 12:41:54 -0700

Andrew Strickland wrote:

"From my own point of view, I don't see that creating two documents
really solve the clarity issue when a single document can be
restructured to achieve the same effect. "

Dale Moberg>> I hope you had a chance to review some earlier messages in
which I explained how the integration framework (also describable as the
extension framework) created confusion and was what we wanted to remove.
I think your opinion, expressed above, is one with which I do not agree.
However, I suspect it will be necessary to go into some technical
matters here in greater detail because the restructuring of which you
dream is not one we foresee working (unless we have two distinct specs
concatenated into one document-that might work except for confusing or
annoying current implementers about what it means to implement what is
in the document.)

GISB introduced the idea of placing metainformation about a business
data payload into separate body parts of a MIME entity in a POSTed HTTP
PDU. The reason for this is that GISB wanted to be able to make use of a
HTTP/HTML browser in sending data. Browsers typically cannot add HTTP
headers, so an entirely new implementation technique was introduced to
convey metainformation. These interactive browser limitations have never
played well with AS2 as it originally was speced by this working group.
We introduced the unification framework-the agreed upon source of most
of the confusion we hope to eliminate-in order to put both approaches
into one document. You now propose some unspecified restructuring that
will solve the clarity issue by reintroducing some unification
perspective. I am not hopeful and several years of having several
authors and editors work on this suggests that a clean break with this
approach is much more promising. Let me elaborate some of the problems
that having them together creates:

Should the multipart/form-data way of formatting metainformation also be
useable with the original POST of the core EDIINT security formats or
should it be restricted to when you also use the GISB receipt mechanism
and/or PGP based formats (open pgp)? 

Should transport headers be used to convey GISB metainformation instead
of bodyparts in a multipart/form-data? How much should we mix and match
the mechanisms? Can you supply both? When both are used, and the same
metainformation item has different values, which one do you mean?

Perhaps "confusion" is the wrong word here. Implementers basically just
did not want to have to implement with this degree of generality and
complexity and called what they did not want to do, "confusing". We
believe they have a point. In point of fact, no one has implemented a
fully general unified AS2 as it is now written. They have picked and
chosen one or the other of the two "parts" they find in it (actually you
should see that the "two parts" phrase already embodies a
misunderstanding). Given that this is what we have ended up having in
working code, we just want to get rid of the complexity and break the
two implemented specs out into separate documents, each of which can be
implemented independently of the other, and both of which can be done by
a single product.

Andrew continues writing: 
"I've been out of the deep technical loop on this for some time so
please don't shoot me if I get some things a little bit wrong...

The original split between AS1 and AS2 was purely due to the difference
in delivery mechanism - one used SMTP/POP3 and the other HTTP. Could it
not be said that this is still true today and in fact both the 'UCC' and
'Energy' variants could be carried by either mechanism? Actually, if
this is not true then maybe it should be."

Dale Moberg>> I will not shoot you, but I think you are laboring under
serious oversimplifications of the technical issues involving in using
SMTP versus using HTTP. There are, I suppose, ways that the variants
(and we will here adopt the simplification which we are hoping to make
true)-the _two_ AS2 variants "could" be carried by either mechanism. For
example, one could ignore the HTTP specification and used
content-transfer-encodings and put them in the HTTP MIME entity. [Not a
good thing for an IETF working group to do, and not something endorsed
here, by the way Ned.) Or, you could make certain that you used ESMTP
mechanisms to make certain your MTAs handled binary content-transfer
encodings (with arbitrarily long strings of octets without a CRLF), and
maybe omit the content-transfer-encoding header (to conform to HTTP
recommended practice). These are not prerequisites we are interested in
enforcing for business users; we want them to be able to use existing
available MTAs and webservers when possible.

In other words, Andrew, the MIME of HTTP and of SMTP and its cousins
differ in some basic ways that frustrates having byte-for-byte identical
PDUs. If you wish to invent a PDU that has this property, please submit
your proposal (and we will shoot it, not you, down.)
Add to the MIME differences, the differences in header conventions! Or
the defaults that govern omitted headers (omit the content-type in mail,
and text/plain (with a 7-bit cte) will be assumed but in HTTP the cte is
as always binary, with a content-type of text/html. Or the fact that
"From" is given different semantic functions as a header. 

The result is that while we have had the goal of keeping the PDUs
similar in AS1 and AS2, the existing standards themselves upon which we
are building do not allow identical PDUs to be used. Since we mainly are
describing or profiling PDUs in AS1 and AS2, keeping the profiles in
separate documents is and will remain a far cleaner way to proceed. 

While your idea is not silly (it is one we aspired to and which we
asymptotically approached until we added the GISB techniques), in
practice it cannot be realized. I do not want to spend time revisiting
these issues, as they were ironed out over 4 years ago. I would very
strongly oppose trying to follow the regroupings you propose later in
your message at this point; it would definitely not remove the
confusions we wish to remove and would in all likelihood create new ones
to boot!

---

From: Yajun Liu <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 10:42:49 -0800

We just implemented AS2 UCC Version. 

I agree that we should keep GISB and UCC version separate. It is up to
companies to implement either or both. For EDIINT service providers or
EDIINT software vendors, they might choose to implement both, but for
service consumers, it is much easier to implement just one as long as it
meets its business needs.

--Yajun

-----Original Message-----
From: Ponko, Vince [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2003 9:20 AM
To: 'Dale Moberg'; [email-masked]'
Subject: RE: Split within EDIINT: Multiple versions of AS2

As an implementor and interested party it is my view that
we have two separate standards and they ought to remain 
that way, in part for the reasons that Dale Moberg cites 
below.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Dale Moberg [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 2:42 PM
To: [email-masked]
Cc: Andrew Stickland
Subject: RE: Split within EDIINT: Multiple versions of AS2

Andrew Strickland wrote:

---

From: "Ponko, Vince" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 12:20:02 -0500

-----Original Message-----
From: Dale Moberg [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 2:42 PM
To: [email-masked]
Cc: Andrew Stickland
Subject: RE: Split within EDIINT: Multiple versions of AS2

Andrew Strickland wrote:

---

From: "Costa, Michael J." <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 13:15:32 -0500

Dick:

A most reasonable idea.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Brooks [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2003 12:19 PM
To: [email-masked]; [email-masked]; 'Dale Moberg'; Ponko,
Vince

Clearly, there are two opposing viewpoints expressed by AS2 implementers.
Supporters of the UCC profile favor splitting the specification, supporters
of the GISB/AIAG profile favor a single specification. The responses thus
far have indicated strong support on both sides.

In an earlier posting, Ned Freed stated:
"There are plenty of examples of specifications split into multiple
documents in the IETF. MIME, for example, is split into 5 documents, RFCs
2045-2049."

I believe we should consider taking the same approach as MIME.
In an attempt to reach consensus I propose the following course of action:

- Create two documents and call them AS2-U and AS2-G
- The draft produced by Rik and Dale will be called AS2-U
- A new draft will be created for AS2-G, which will be largely based on the
text that was removed from AS2 draft 11.
- Following the MIME model, the group will create a conformance document
along the lines of RFC 2049. This will spell out in detail what is required
to be AS2 conformant.

I believe this will address the clarity issues which Rik identified, that
ultimately led to this situation.

Does this bring us closer to agreement?

Dick Brooks
Systrends, Inc

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked]
[mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Ponko, Vince
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2003 10:20 AM
To: 'Dale Moberg'; [email-masked]'
Subject: RE: Split within EDIINT: Multiple versions of AS2

-----Original Message-----
From: Dale Moberg [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 2:42 PM
To: [email-masked]
Cc: Andrew Stickland
Subject: RE: Split within EDIINT: Multiple versions of AS2

Andrew Strickland wrote: