HP to Launch Fremont E-Commerce Framework Next Week.

Hewlett-Packard Co will begin talking about its own e-commerce application integration strategy next week, according to industry reports. Following on from Microsoft Corp's BizTalk, HP will launch what is expected to be an open source framework codenamed Fremont, a set of Java-based APIs. It will bridge back-end systems with e-commerce front-end applications, and act as a translator for business-to-business transactions, said the reports.

HP is hoping to get endorsement for the effort from the industry, including Sun Microsystems Inc. Microsoft announced BizTalk earlier this year, but gave few technical details. It is not expected to ship until next year, well after Windows 2000 has been introduced. Like BizTalk and the RosettaNet e-commerce framework, backed by a group of vendors and customers, the HP effort is likely to endorse the XML extensible markup language as the data description language.