Through partnerships and collaborative commerce, businesses can capitalize on the unique aspects of the Internet to offer solutions that transcend traditional business models. The Internet makes possible a radical paradigm shift with the potential to transform insular supply chains and B2B exchanges and sub-optimal approaches to online consumer distribution into open and dynamic marketplaces or trading communities. Developing a platform to automatically manage relationships between a set of actors in the e-commerce environment brings several technical requirements. This presentation explains the environment, the requirements and shows why and how the combined use of XML, XSL and Java is the right choice of architecture. It also describes the issues the developers have to face and what we expect to see soon in the XML standards