Web Services Reliable Messaging update

By Peter Abrahams 18 Sep 2003 | IT-Director.com, special to SearchWebServices.com

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Market Analysis

Web Services Reliable Messaging update
In March I wrote two articles about Web Services Reliable Messaging, describing two competing specifications: WS Reliability from Sun, Oracle and friends and WS Reliable Messaging from BEA, IBM, Microsoft and Tibco (BIMT). Since I wrote some progress has been made.

Firstly Oasis set up a WS Reliable Messaging Technical Committee (WS-RM TC) and based its work on the Sun-Oracle specification (note that Oasis used the BIMT name as it better described the problem space). This committee has met several times and improved and expanded the specification. I criticized the original on several counts and my concerns do seem to have been addressed. The major concern was that the application layer was responsible for all the protocols required for the various forms of guaranteed delivery. The Oasis specification recognises a Reliable Messaging Process (RMP) that does that on behalf of the application. However, just as with the BIMT specification, there is no definition of the application interface to the RMP.

The specification is still very much a work in progress with several comments in the draft saying that sections must be improved or rewritten.

On the 4th of September the TC had a face to face meeting. The meeting included the first successful tests of the protocol enabling communications between different implementations from Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC and Oracle. The test harness included a 'network troublemaker' that simulated various error conditions that could affect the successful message delivery. The tests ran for 36 hours without problem.

In the meantime BIMT continued to develop their specification and in July Microsoft hosted a meeting to discuss it with interested parties and to garner further support. There have been no further public pronouncements but it is understood that BIMT will bring their specification to a standards body in due course.

Looking at the OASIS and the BIMT specification there now seems little functional difference (obviously the detailed syntax is not identical). The only substantive difference I could find is that OASIS sends an acknowledgment (ACK) for each message separately; whereas BIMT has a construct that allows multiple messages to be acknowledged in on ACK. The BIMT construct will improve performance, by reducing message traffic, to some extent but does add an extra layer of complexity to the implementation.

Given the progress on the OASIS specification I think that BIMT need to rapidly submit their proposal to a standards body, and/or express their concerns about the OASIS specification, so that a single standard can be agreed. WS-RM is too important the future of web services for this split to continue.

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