The Object Management Group has issued a Request for Proposals for electronic payment interfaces, for both minor payments, involving just a few cents, or fractions or a cent even, and large payments over the Internet. The Object Group’s interest in all this is of course its Corba Common Object Request Broker Architecture, as the transactions are performed over distributed systems and thus, use distributed objects. Andrew Watson, the Object Group’s architectural director said that the organization now has a critical mass of members asking for such a Request for Proposals, hence the move. It has about half a dozen banks as well as Visa International Inc as its members, and some of those banks were behind the move. The SET Secure Electronic Transaction protocol could be one answer, and would only need to be recast in Object Group’s IDL Interface Definition Language, which Watson said wouldn’t be difficult. But the Request calls for a variety of payment protocols to be supported within Corba. Initial submission are due August 4, with final submissions arriving no later than November 4. Adoption is expected in the early part of next year, says Watson.
