I probably get about four or five calls a month from recruiters asking about if I would like a job based on my knowing what the heck cXML is. It’s one of those skills that you never think about being important – until people start calling you and asking if you’d like a job because you know what the heck it is.
In the current economic state where every edge in getting a job counts – cXML is one of those tools you want to put in your tool box where you can find it. The funny thing is – it’s basically pretty easy to work with and understand.
So … what is it and how can you find out about it? Well it is a protocol – that was created by Ariba for eProcurement. Now if you don’t know what Ariba is you probably need to go back to eCommerce school and take class 101 - “How web sites sell things”. Ariba pretty much created much of the concept of B2B back in the late 90’s, in fact they were one of the first B2B companies to go public and cXML is one of the reasons for their success.
cXML isn’t just a fancy version of XML. For anyone who doesn’t know how commerce on the internet works you the customer, log into a web site, you find something you like, you click on it and an order is placed and you miraculously get your product.
What happens behind the scenes in this scenario that you don’t know is that it really works something like this You – the user – clicked on a link for a book – say on ArugulaBooks.com, and the link to that book is really just an item in a catalog, and that item was picked from the catalog and added to your “cart” the cart being your order.
But Arugula for example, doesn’t create books do they? And they’d go broke pretty quick if they had to keep copies of every one of those books you see on their site sitting in a warehouse. So what really happened is Arugula Books has probably a couple hundred or more catalogs of books from different manufacturers of books. When you clicked on that link to put the book in your cart – this really incredible story began that interacted with several different businesses.
First you and Arugula created an order on their system – that order generated an order to a book distributor – and the book distributor received that order and arranged to have it shipped with FedNext shipping directly to your house, and Arugula also sent another Invoice message to your credit card company.
All you see on your card – all you know – is you clicked on a link – and you got a book 2 days later.
But the story of cXML is the story of how all that happens. A “proper” cXML order has room for all the fields necessary for those transactions. It has in it’s header all the info needed to communicate who the company is placing the order, who the company is that’s filling that order, where it’s supposed to be delivered, how it’s supposed to be delivered, the kind of item you ordered, credit card info, heck it even knows every item by it’s UNSPSC code.
So if you can learn to read a cXML document – and you can learn what it takes to make one work with all these different systems – you pretty much have a solid chance at landing a very good very solid job.
You can find out more about cXML at some of these links … and I’ll cover more about how to read it, what rules are required to make a good cXML document – and even a tool I created to test them in the next few blogs.
- cXML.org
- cXML version 1.2 Spec and samples
- cXML FAQ’s
- cXML at Wikipedia
- cXML User's Guide
- cXML Solutions Guide
.Now – I’m not going to dig in too deep but you should find the next few blogs here a good starting point for understanding this amazing and sometimes complex process.
That’s your reading assignment for this week…
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