Interaction protocol for managing cross company processes among network-distributed applications

DETAILED DESCRIPTION The present invention is premised on the observation that there are at least two basic constituent parts in any e-commerce business model.
These are commerce services, such as shopping carts, catalogs, and payment services, and commerce processes, such as catalog updates, purchase order submissions, bids and quotes.
A comprehensive e-commerce solution has to integrate these services and processes dynamically, based on configurable interaction definitions.
This means that a set of procedures is needed to define the interaction between the applications that establish the services and provide the processes.
The present invention is premised on the further observation that an Internet infrastructure solution toward providing the dynamic integration of services and processes should be vendor and platform independent.
As noted above, XML and related data representation standardization efforts, combined with industry-based e-commerce standards efforts, are efforts in the direction of an integrated Internet e-commerce environment.
But these efforts fall short of the complete integration needed.
The present invention provides for a simple but powerful application interaction protocol that is used to implement secure Internet-wide electronic commerce applications.
The protocol is referred to as the Commerce Exchange Interaction Protocol (CXIP) and operates at the application level, providing a formal set of procedures to facilitate functional interoperation among application services and processes.
The CXIP protocol specifies the message types that are exchanged between applications, the semantics of these messages, and the exchange order.
The application interaction protocol, which is not specific to any particular functional domain and specifies interactions that are independent of transactional content, includes four component parts: message formats, message types, message exchange semantics and transportation assumptions.
In an illustrated implementation of the application interaction protocol, data, object and method invocation requests are exchanged between applications by means of structured documents that use XML tags and that are consistent with the protocol