Parsing X12 850 Purchase Orders in Java with OBOE

No heavy commercial EDI engines required. If you’ve ever worked with EDI in Java, you know the pain: massive commercial libraries, hundreds of generated classes, or writing your own fragile parser from scratch. OBOE (Open Business Objects for EDI) changes that. It’s a mature, lightweight, pure-Java library that uses simple XML message definition files to describe any EDI transaction — including the popular X12 850 Purchase Order. In this article, I’ll show you exactly how to parse a real X12 850