The Internet has created a tremendous opportunity to conduct business electronically. Innovative business concepts, like virtual enterprises, supply chain management, or one-to-one marketing, as well as advanced competitive strategies encompassing these business concepts, like mass customization, may be followed-up much more efficiently. However, competitive strategies like mass customization require sophisticated information infrastructures to support the indispensable business to business electronic commerce-even for small and medium enterprises taking part in a virtual enterprise that pursues mass customization. Especially electronic data interchange (EDI), which is understood as a means to exchange business data, is crucial to set up and maintain virtual enterprises. Thus, there is high demand on inexpensive and easily employable software that allows platform-independent exchange of business data between companies. We present an approach to a component (application) framework that aims to achieve this goal. By using the extensible markup language (XML) as an important cross-platform technique, together with common business communication standards, we show how the border of heterogeneous (distributed) application systems can be overcome. With this, the business communication protocol is set up. Taking this protocol as a basis, we further present a component framework, which is implemented using the JavaBeans technology that supports efficient inter-company communication. In addition, we show how this approach may further develop to a means for inter-company coordination.
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