How to send messages between Companies

Question

I often see myself in the need of setting up automated transfer of messages/data/files between companies.

Besides the monstrous EDIFACT, Odette and a few other "big" electronic data exchange standards every industry has a few dozen or even e few hundred relatively sane relatively light weight, relatively well documented file formats for orders and the like.

What I'm missing is the right protocol to move files in this formats from machine to machine. The protocol should support

1. authentication
2. be usable with standard tools on MS Windows and unix
3. support something transaction like: a file is transfered or it isn't. but it is never received in half transfered state.
4. transport encryption
5. firewall friendly
6. a way to "bundle", e.g. an xml description and a bunch of PDFs.

Today basically everybody falls back to FTP. But FTP servers struggle hard to fullfill requiremetns 3, 5 and 6.

Is there a better way? Can things like Amazon SQS used to send messages from one company to the other?

Clarification: I mean small and medium companies. Our partners usually have no in-house developers and sometimes even no in-house IT people. So there needs to be an abolute minimal set-up effort at at least one side of the connection.

Answer 1

SOAP and web services ticks all the boxes

Here is a list of Java Open Source Web Services frameworks