Design And Implementation Of Internet-based EDI Software

EDI is the precursor and former formation of e-commerce and appeared in 1970's. At that time, some big companies began to build the private network to share the information about sale, supply, transmission of fund and disposing the invoices. EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) converts standard data, so this way optimizes the process of trade between the companies and eliminates almost the paper working and manual intervene. But the cost of the translating software and private network are so high, that generally only big companies and their suppliers can afford EDI. Although the government and enterprise promote the developing of the EDI, in fact the prevalence of EDI is far from the their expectation. The openness, low-cost and high-adaptability of Internet brings the vigor for the developing of EDI. Internet-based EDI supply traditional EDI growing with new chance. To those small enterprises without strong technical and economic power, internet-based could make them take full advantage of EDI to develop the e-commerce. So far there are lots of enterprises and organizations doing research on the technology of combining the EDI and Internet. Luckily the author of paper took apart in the developing the product of internet-based EDI, WEBEDI in 1999 and 2000 and did some research on the technology of implementation of internet-based EDI. According to the implementation of WEBEDI, the paper focuses on the methods of combining the EDI and Internet, especially on the Web-EDI, including the basic concept, technology and developing trend of EDI; contrast the methods of combining the EDI and Internet; the whole design project of WEBEDI; the structure of WEBEDI software; user interface, contract management, formation mapping and DB interface of WEBEDI software.