Computer giants back ecommerce standard

Several industry heavyweights have taken a step closer to establishing an XML based standard for linking applications and services for ecommerce transactions.

Microsoft and ten other companies have submitted Soap 1.1 (simple object access protocol), a web standard for data exchange, to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for review.

Supporters of the standard include IBM, Hewlett Packard, Compaq, CommerceOne, Lotus and SAP but so far, Sun Microsystems has refused to back it.

Soap 1.1 supports message transport using the standard simple mail transport protocol (SMTP) and IBM's MQSeries middleware. It also supports file transfer protocol (FTP) and TCP/IP and the latest version extends Soap's asynchronous messaging capabilities.

The industry must now wait for the W3C to vote whether or not to assign a working group to review the protocol and define its scope. But according to a W3C spokeswoman no immediate decisions are expected.

According to a recent report on the standard by Zona Research, the coalition of sponsors "makes this a major political step." Zona believes that Soap has evolved from being part of Microsoft attempt to control XML to becoming a cross platform, cross messaging protocol for XML based B2B commerce.

The Zona study also noted that Sun is not included because advocates because the vendor believes that Java's remote method invocation (RMI) can do much of the same work as Soap.

Microsoft last year submitted an early version of Soap to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for review. But the company said it believes the W3C is a more appropriate standards group because XML is a web based technology.