Reliable Messages for Web Services

A new specification defining reliable messaging for Web services, authored by BEA, IBM, Microsoft, and business integration software company TIBCO, has been released. WS-ReliableMessaging aims to bring message queuing capabilities to Web services, although differences between it and a competing specification called WS-Reliability developed by Fujitsu, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems must be ironed out in order to achieve broad interoperability among vendors.

Reliable messaging is the ability to guarantee that a message will be received by its intended recipient one and only one time, even if the recipient is temporarily offline or if the network connection between sender and recipient is intermittent. Technologies such as Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) and IBM’s MQSeries (recently renamed Websphere MQ) provide this capability for internal business systems, but not across Web services. WS-ReliableMessaging is part of Microsoft’s Global XML Architecture (GXA)-a broader initiative to address some of the limitations of Web services that make them difficult to use for large-scale, line-of-business applications. Like the previously announced WS-Transactions and WS-Security, WS-ReliableMessaging takes a technology already understood and used in corporate applications and applies it to Web services.