Web Services Reliable Messaging - An Update

October 30, 2004 2:50 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Reliable Messaging holds a special interest for me, having played a significant part in my career (in the manifestation of various technologies such MQSeries, MSMQ, and, most recently, the products of Envoy) over the past ten years. Therefore it is with great interest that I have been monitoring the progression of the two emergent Web Services Reliable Messaging standards - WS-ReliableMessaging and WS-Reliability.

Just over a year ago I posted an entry to this blog questioning whether there would be convergence across the two aforementioned specifications. Therefore I thought it was about time to check up on their status, and see whether there had been any significant activity.

Well, it seems that both specifications are still forging ahead, with support from different vendors and, in the case of WS-Reliability, Oasis, a standards organization. The vendors behind WS-ReliableMessaging have held a number of vendor workshops, and WS-Reliability has reached a formal v1.0 release within Oasis. Below, I've summarized the status of both specifications.

The development momentum behind IBM, Microsoft and BEA suggests that WS-ReliableMessaging will definitely capture a significant marketshare. The underlying concept (reliable messaging) behind both these specifications is common, and it would not surprise me to see some of the proponents of WS-Reliability supporting both variants within their product offerings. Certainly with the convergence on common specifications within other aspects of the WS-* stack, it would be a shame to see disconnected islands of Web Services reliability support across different vendor implementations - let's hope that we do not have to resort to WS-Reliability <-> WS-ReliableMessaging bridges!

I'll probably check back in early next year to see what has developed. With the emergence of new server products from BEA (Quicksilver) and IBM (Jetstream), as well as early offering of Microsoft's Indigo, it will be interesting to see how this area plays out.

Note: The information below is by no means complete. This is an evolving posting - if there are any inaccuracies or additions, please leave a comment and I will update the content.

WS-ReliableMessaging

Latest Spec: March 2004

Editors: BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Tibco

Current Implementations:

Apache Sandesha (WS-RM on top of Apache Axis)
IBM Emerging Technologies Toolkit
Microsoft Enterprise Solutions Framework (early implementation of WS-RM) - see blog posting
Systinet Server for Java

WS-Reliability

Latest Spec: 1.1 (Committee Draft 1.086, 24 August 2004)

Editors: Fujitsu, Novell, Oracle, Sun

Committee Members:

Arjuna Technologies, Booz Allen Hamilton, Choreology, Cyclone Commerce, France Telecom, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Mitre Corporation, NEC, Nokia, Novell, Oracle, SAP, SeeBeyond, Sun, University of Hong Kong, webMethods, WRQ