In my opinion, this is one of the best Joomla extensions I have ever used (out of several hundred). It is well designed, documented to a professional level and coded in a clear and straight-forward manner. Skylark provides a framework for development of an EDI server that will manage the actual interchange including both in and out translation of data format. There are several examples that provide excellent guidance in the use of translators and transports.

Transports include ftp, email and custom server access. For the most part interchange documents are placed directly (or translated) on a processing queue if they are modest in size. Larger documents can be processed from their original location on the EDI server. Useful for testing, documents can be uploaded via the Joomla interface.

The Joomla interface provides views of translated documents, processing logs and alerts as well as management features to view, delete and retransmit. Automatic processing can be configured for real-time or delayed transmission.

Be prepared to delve into the inner workings of the processes, translators and transports as you will need to understand the details to correctly configure and use the system. You will probably want to code your own translator and/or transport unless one of the examples provides the functionality that you need. The internal format required is XML.

There are a few bugs, however, the code is written to provide excellent guidance in the logs so they are easy to correct. You should be moderately comfortable in reading XML, PHP code and in the architecture of a Joomla component or it will be a struggle.

I recommend this component to anyone who has an EDI project or is just interested in learning more about EDI and how it can be implemented through Joomla.

Thanks to Chris Davenport for such a great tool.