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Request for e-commerce/ASN.1 advice

From: Dave <dave_at_smart.net>
Date: 1997/09/30
Message-ID: <60rmd2$e7s$1@news.smart.net>#1/1

Hello,

My company is interested in making request-based [e-commerce-like] information available to our customer companies.  

The information will be accessed over the Internet by custom applications
(applications with VB/PowerBuilder/Oracle/C++/Java, etc. front-ends -- not
web browsers).  

I'm looking into a solution where the custom customer applications would:  

  1. Open an HTTP connection to our server over the Internet.
  2. Make an HTTP POST request of Content-type "multipart/form-data", then send an ASN.1/BER-encoded data stream as the information request.
  3. Receive an ASN.1/BER-encoded data stream as the information response.

We do not have a need to exchange binary data. Our primary goal is to make writing the custom applications painless and straightforward for our customer companies. In light of this, does this solution seem advantageous as opposed to the following ASN.1/BER alternatives (or any other alternatives that you might know o f):  

  1. EDIFACT.
  2. ASCII name/value pairs. The advantage here, it seems, is that we could add name/value pairs to our API at will without effecting our customers' applications.
  3. ASCII comma-delimited values. The advantage here, it seems, is that almost every application tool that our customers may have will support comma-delimited data imports and exports.

Any advice would be very much appreciated.

(I know that this message doesn't entirely apply to any of the newsgroups
that I've posted it to; but then again, I don't think it applies to *any* newsgroup in existance save for perhaps "alt.internet.commerce" -- which is full of messages containing "$$$" in their subject. If you can point to other source of information, that would be great too).

--
Dave Clausen
dave_at_smart.net
http://www.smart.net/~dave
Received on Tue Sep 30 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT

Original text of this message

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