jPOS CMF

About a year ago I've blogged about jCard and jPTS (the jPOS-EE based Card Management System / Stored Value Engine and the jPOS Transaction Switch). As part of the project, we defined what we called our IMF (internal message format) based on the ISO-8583 v2003 standard. After several deployments and mapping exercises to different source (SS) and destination stations (DS), we believe that this extra message normalization layer was a good thing to do. We get to see jPOS based systems connected to other jPOS based systems all the time, which is a good thing and makes things easier (when the connecting parties don't see their channel and packager configurations as some kind of secret sauce and get to kindly exchange them), but the packager/channel is just the low level plumbing, a lot of effort has to be done on the higher levels in order to get them to play nicely with each other. Our jCard system already has a quite complete set of self tests that use this format, same goes for jPTS. As part of this message normalization effort we plan to morph our internal tests into a TCK. Andy and Dave from Online Strategies are already using a similar format and are keen to work together into merging the differences. Mark is also #noded for this effort :) We are releasing this work under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License and everybody is welcome to participate. You can get the PDF version here and you are very welcome to actively collaborate with the DocBook version (http://github/ar/jPOS-CMF). This is by no means a perfect spec, there's a lot of work to be done, but instead of reinventing a new spec, or coding to someone else's proprietary spec, we encourage you to take this one as yours. You can even change the cover page (as long as you retain some due credit). Every new project will require some tweaks and addition to the spec and TCK, and we are here to make that happen fast. Feel free to contact us or send us a tweet.