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GCN Home > 01/12/04 issue

Shopping without dropping

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

DOD EMall embraces new XML extension to handle transactions of $1 million weekly

To keep pace with spiraling traffic, the Defense Department’s EMall portal is shifting to an emerging transactions standard based on the Extensible Markup Language.

The portal is one of the largest online operations—inside government or out—to adopt the standard, dubbed Electronic Business using XML, or ebXML. By spring, the DOD EMall team expects the purchasing portal will be completely powered by ebXML.

The mall’s business has been growing while the systems supporting it have gotten more complex, said Debra Roobol, the DOD EMall program manager and chief of the Defense Logistics Agency’s E-Commerce and Standards Branch.

Those systems—managed by a trio of prime contractors—processed about 360,000 transactions in fiscal 2003, or about $1 million per week.

This year, the number of transactions will grow to 475,000, Roobol estimated.

In May 2001, the Defense Information Systems Agency recommended that DOD EMall contractors use the Java2 Enterprise Edition platform plus WebLogic application servers and application development tools from BEA Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif.

“A J2EE approach gives us scalability, affordability, faster maintenance and enhancement capability,” Roobol said.

The three contractors that support the mall sought a common format for their multiple transaction systems and found it in ebXML supported by J2EE.

Bye-bye, EDI

The up-and-coming ebXML standard could supplant electronic data interchange, the dominant pre-Internet method for business-to-business transactions online.

“EbXML gives us a lower risk and more flexible architecture,” said Ashley Byrd, a DOD EMall systems architect at the ICF Consulting Group Inc. of Fairfax, Va., which is a subcontractor to the South Carolina Research Authority, one of the three primes.

Eventually, the plan is for DOD EMall to embrace wireless clients and to have single-sign-on compatibility with other Defense portals. It will also integrate more tightly with DLA’s logistics modernization effort, Roobol said.

Moving to WebLogic sets the stage for a public-key infrastructure, Roobol said. Then service members can use their Common Access Cards to identify themselves at the mall.



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