I have been asked to tie in Ariba's PunchOut by a client's supplier into our procurement system. The procurement module is a small part of a Java EE application running mostly on JBoss.
Poking around the last couple days it does seem that a cXML PunchOut implementation is pretty popular but that doesn't make it correct. To say I am nervous about implementing a proprietary 'protocol' is putting it lightly. Since it is only one client's one vendor pushing for this, I still have a lot of latitude.
I've been kind of thrown into this space. What is considered the industry B2B standard for this kind of thing? Is there anything existing or emerging as a more open standard for B2B transactions? What is the most popular modern approach to this kind of problem?
Most legacy systems use EDI over a VAN and it is still used by the majority of vendors. The standards body that developed these standards also developed an XML dialect of EDI.