donzog

We do have a Registered Trademark. Thank you for the reply.

Ah, no worries mate, it's a software toolkit and not a pizza - can't make everyone happy. We are in the business of simplifying things for devs, and I'm sorry that you had a bad experience with our product, but if you found a better option that works for you, then I'm pleased.

The different EDI standards are pretty explicit about the sequence of messages (276/277, etc.), acknowledgments (technical, functional, etc.), and conversation items (interchange IDs, duplicates, sender/receiver IDs, etc.). And yes, there is a requirement that EDI transactions do something or represent something that does something, in a specific way.

EDI does a lot of things, but its transport and semantics are visibly decoupled, whereas in web APIs, they appear to be somewhat uniform.

Web API is far from vague; on the contrary, it might even be more stringent (and selective) as the inbound data goes via multiple stages of validation as opposed to EDI, which does "take-all" data, then either "parse all" or "reject-all".

Are they still in business? I heard they fired lots of developers, bless them.

Go with Stedi.com.au instead, it's lighter. Longtime EdiFabric developer. Always had a plan.

+1 haha, indeed.

Yep, that's becoming mainstream. UNECE is currently working on a JSON schema for EDIFACT, due next year, as far as I'm aware.

The EDI standard was made independent from the transport (AS2, SFTP, etc.), so files can be transferred in any reliable/secure way, even web API/HTTP.

With this UNECE initiative, it begins to separate the syntax from the specification, e.g., to be able to transport an invoice as both a text file in EDIFACT syntax, and a JSON file in a matching hierarchy/structure.

The article outlines that API IS NOT JSON over HTTP, albeit it's the most popular case. You can send a text file/binary (that contains X12, EDIFACT) to an API as easily as JSON. In fact, that's what EdiNation does; it allows you to send EDI files to a web API. So it shouldn't matter if you deal with EDI or JSON, just convert one to the other, and off you go. Another way to do what everybody else is doing anyway.