DocumentLayer Service
Xin Chen · Apress eBooks · 2004
Business-to-business (B2B) applications are all about processing business documents. The model for such applications is straightforward. Business partners send documents to the B2B application over the Internet or another channel. Our application will process the document, which involves extracting data from the document, examining it, and performing some business logic on the data presented in the document. Such processes often generate an output document or response document that contains status information about a particular document process. Although each B2B application achieves a very distinct business goal, these applications have a common architecture, one centered on the exchange of documents between business partners. This common architecture may come in different flavors and implementations, but they all more or less follow an approach that begins when a client requests some services by sending a business document to the B2B application, where the document is put through a series of layers of service, each performing a particular task based on the data in the document, and ends with some type of response document being sent back to the client to inform it of the status of the operation.