I-D ACTION:draft-arnold-scmp-00.txt

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	Title		: Simple Commerce Messaging Protocol (SCMP)
	Author(s)	: T. Arnold, J. Eaton, M. Jimenez
	Filename	: draft-arnold-scmp-00.txt
	Pages		: 8
	Date		: 03-Sep-98
	
The Simple Commerce Messaging Protocol (SCMP) is a general-purpose
commerce transport protocol for securely communicating a set of data
from a sending agent's application to a receiving agent's server. And,
where the response by the receiving agent's sever to the sending agent
is, in fact, the reply from the transaction represented by the set of
data in the message's payload. The intent of this protocol is to
define a method where trading partners can perform on-line business
transactions in an environment where the sending partner is fully
authenticated, and the message cannot be repudiated.
 
The SCMP message content, hereinafter referred to as message payload,
is not intended to be defined or specified. SCMP does not specify
payload contents or how trading partners are expected to process
the payload, beyond basic server-level functions related to processing
SCMP-headers.This intent is to permit trading partners the flexibility
to implement either a standard commerce message format as in ANSI-X12
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) or some other proprietary
transaction format.
 
The only requirement on the message payload is that it be identified to
the receiver utilizing MIME naming and formatting [MIME] and used to
identify the type of payload contained in the SCMP data area.

In this manner, SCMP fundamentally differs from many emerging
commerce message protocols. Beyond specifying the method for transport,
encryption, authentication and handling, these other protocols
specify the contents of the message and details how a server is to
process and respond to the message payload.
 
SCMP is intended as both an on-line and batch protocol.  The exact
content of the message and the processing constraints are specified in
SCMP-headers.

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