Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: What is BizTalk?

Author:Yoz Grahame
Posted:5/26/1999; 7:00:17 AM
Topic:What is BizTalk?
Msg #:6722 (In response to 6720)
Prev/Next:6721 / 6723

Sound hopelessly irrelevant, like other XMLisms that Microsoft has run press releases for.

I'm not so sure. The key points that BizTalk is founded on are:

1) People/businesses are much more likely to come up with different XML schemas to represent their data that settle on a single one, especially since most would prefer a simple high-level, narrow-domain schema that's easy to use and relevant to their task rather that a low-level, wide-domain schema that can be used for any data representation but looks complicated, especially since wide-domain schemas don't, most of the time, make translation and extraction easier but just push it further up the schema ladder.

2) Since 1) means it's unlikely that people are going to settle on a single complete data schema to use, it's probably better to come up with a system that accepts that, and gives people a way to a) access and publish the many available schemas and b) encourage ways to translate between those schemas.

3) XML developers want to deal with relevant data, not with transport or parsing.

While I think that the wrapper schema that BizTalk represents may, to a small degree, contradict point 1), I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff for point 3).

I also think that you shouldn't worry about BizTalk being a direct competitor to XML-RPC (at least, not as a spec or service - product lines are something else). If query-reponse is implemented in Biztalk (and looking even deeper into the docs they talk about something similar) then XML-RPC could be able sit on top of BizTalk quite happily, and BizTalk components could theoretically make XML-RPC more popular (since it could take away the burden of transport implementation from those needing to create XML-RPC services on a platform).

My main problem with BizTalk is not the idea but that it's meant to be an open standards body that acts as a hub for collection and publication of many different schemas from many different businesses - and we're meant to trust Microsoft with running it. Microsoft has talked in the past (most notably in the Halloween docs) about commoditisation of protocols - would you put your protocol in Microsoft's hands?

-- Yoz

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