Hacker News Reader

Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

I cut my teeth on this kind of thing 25 years ago...it's the stuff that makes the world go around, but gets shuffled off to the back corners of the tech world. Way more interesting and nuanced than it gets credit. So many problems that were solved decades ago that have been forgotten as the world perpetually reinvents the wheel.

View on HN

When I worked for a huge electronics distributor in the EU I got assigned the EDI hot potato by accident and kinda grew to like it. I got to talk to other companies's IT people that handled it on the their side instead of business facing sales or management people. Started with loving the XML formats and hating EDIFACT but that got reversed real fast. One of the projects I'm still most proud of from that time is consolidating all of our EDI systems into one, coherent (and beautifly designed I might add since no one interfered because no one cared ;) whole that used EDIFACT as an internal format to represent documents. That enabled developing integrations quickly by just writing a translator/parser between our format and whatever God awful format the other party used.

One thing I do hate with a passion still is the AS2 transmission later that some vendors used. My god, what a shitshow that is. No stable clients, discrepancies between implementations and all for what? Essentially transferring files. Ugh.

AS2 is interesting because it includes a cryptographically signed Message Disposition Notification (MDN) - whenever there's a question if a document was delivered, just give the MDN information to the partner. This has led to some interesting troubleshooting sessions, where it turns out that the message failed somewhere in the partner's system, and the only way for them to dig it out and identify the issue was to check logs for the MDN message ID.

I've also heard that MDNs hold up in a court of law; no idea if that's been tested. But it's a great way to confirm delivery of the payload without having to worry about parsing errors.

This was my favourite part working for an e-commerce store that had an archaic inventory/order management system. While not EDI, I wrestled with a multitude of large CSVs that needed to be parsed in order to have a complete picture of the inventory and orders.

I would love finding the system was able to export a slightly more helpful CSV somewhere in a hidden menu that would enable me to gradually remove my spaghetti code or reduce the number of CSV imports.

Maybe we wouldn’t reinvent the wheel so often if the old wheels

  PO1**1*2P*0.0001*PE*GE*EDI Core~

didn’t require memorizing a huge compression dictionary just to work with.

You don't have to memorize if you have a computer translate for you.

Why would you do anything else when the world is running at 9600 baud.

EDI Notepad was a great tool for this - unfortunately it looks like it was shut down a few years ago :( Old versions should work fine however, unless you're using a very recent standard. (We were using the 1996 X12 standard until 2015 or thereabouts)

Did you ever do any work with Sterling Software? I worked at the Commerce division supporting parts of the X.25 and ISDN network. Good times.

Definitely - I think anyone who has ever touched the EDI space is familiar with Sterling. My time hands-on in that world was pretty short, but it was good background to have for the projects that came later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com