EDI - Exceedingly Delirious Interface

[roberto_vacca2]

“That’s all folks”:

surely in your heterodox life , you have come across this inscription that used to head at the end of every Warner Bros show for young and old from 1930 to the present.

From the newest Bugs Bunny or Porky Pig to the oldest Bosko.  How many characters!

It’s difficult to find someone who never heard about them.  Over the years they change to find ways to stay relevant to modern people.

Characters was extremely crazy.

So we can say that “It’s NOT all Folks”.

The same we could say in techology facilitators. They invent always a new technology to adapt to the audience. But WHY? To make us smile? I really don’t thinks so. Pheraps they play with our lives in a sadistic way, like the poor victims of Bugs Bunny like Yosemite Sam or Elmer Fudd.

And pay attention: you could study all the economic matters in the world but you’ll never find a motivation to the EDI existence today .

This intro to say that EDI (or Electronic Data Interchange if you don’t know)  was first introduced in 1960 when a man, Ed Gulbert,  probably a sad guy animated by greateness to leave a sign in the history, developed a form of electronic comunication between shipment supply chains in the US army.. Yes always them, they like to create sufference in the world. 

In an era before Internet, EDI  enabled instant  long-distance communication, better than rely  on slow postal services.  They say… but I always received postal card from vacations… anyway..

EDI was a critical facilitator of early globalization. If globalization today is a fact, it’s because of EDI. Say thanks to Ed Gui if today we live in this crazy world.

Let’s go to the point.

What’s EDI in poor words?

EDI it’s  a hierarchical data in  an insane flat file format.

You have to know the schema. But sorry for you but the schema is  a copyrighted secret, very huge, and can be interpreted in millions of ways.

And last but not least: exchange is ad Hoc so you have to buy or create the wheel every single time you have to deal with EDI.

Good way to make companies spend their money. Thanks EdGui (That’s Iron Maiden reference)

It’s a Pay to PLAY.

Tools are old and entreched and they’re expensive because licensing suppresses freely available technology or implementations.

XML was introduced in 1996, and completely obsoleted this technology over 20 years ago but EDI persist  thanks to BIG players  inertia in the market.

It’s a kind of scam.

If you work for a large company and have access to the tools it’s not bad, but if you’re small or your company want to give a penny for it, you can spend months and still months, getting someone at SPS to cough up what is at the end of the day just a text file. Probably billions are shaved off the global economy each year by EDI.

Learning EDI is hard as learning to swim sure, all master and knowledge lovers would say “keep trying, resist, never give up”… That’s not the matters we talk about.

The problem is that they are asking you to swim across the ocean, arms and legs, when you have ships, boats, planes, jets at your disposal.

I’m agree with you, if you give me TIME, FOOD, ASSISTANCE and everything I would need, probably I could survive. But the question remains: “WHY?” Probably company is conviced to pay less? It’s the same question when your city’s major thinks that it’s not a problem if someone remains in the road. The main thing to support is the city and his power.

So, after all, are you still convinced to use EDI? Probably I will write down the implementation that I choosed to adopt but against my will. With no tools, because tools costs they say. Without informations, because knowledge on EDI is copyrigthted.

Why I did it? Not because I was comanded, not for sure. Probably because you should always try everything, before talking about something, even though you want to speak about it badly.

That’s NOT all Folks 😊

*All ri