Systems/Enterprise:

WS-RELIABILITY RATIFIED AS OASIS STANDARD

The OASIS international standards consortium today announced that its members have approved WS-Reliability version 1.1 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. Developed through an open process, WS-Reliability provides a method to guarantee message delivery over the Internet, enabling companies to conduct reliable business-to-business trading or collaboration using Web services.

"Reliable message delivery is one of the key issues to be addressed if there is to be widespread adoption of Web services, particularly in business-to-business scenarios," said Neil Macehiter, research director at Ovum. "Communications using Internet-based protocols, such as HTTP and SMTP, are inherently unreliable and do not support the assured or ordered delivery demanded by the applications on which businesses depend. WS-Reliability, being an approved OASIS Standard developed in open forum that addresses these limitations, is an important step on the path to realizing the promise of Web services."

WS-Reliability supports guaranteed delivery, which ensures the message is delivered at least once, duplication elimination, which certifies that the message is delivered at most once, and message delivery ordering, which guarantees messages in a sequence are delivered in the order sent.

"Financial transactions are just one example of the kind of applications that need WS-Reliability to meet quality-of-service standards. A message requesting a money withdrawal, for instance, must be received by an application once and only once," noted Tom Rutt, chair of the OASIS Web Services Reliable Messaging (WSRM) Technical Committee. "With the WS-Reliability OASIS Standard, information can be shared between software programs over the Internet as reliably as within a single application on a laptop."

Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS, applauded the efforts of the technical committee members who produced the new standard, recalling, "The genesis for WS-Reliability was submitted to OASIS in March 2003 by Fujitsu, Hitachi, Oracle, NEC, Sonic Software, and Sun Microsystems. These companies recognized the importance of advancing their work within an open process where the entire community of vendors, users, and governments could contribute. Today's approval of WS-Reliability as an OASIS Standard is proof positive that it is possible to garner broad input on the development of a standard and still meet time-to-market needs."

Participation in the OASIS WSRM Technical Committee remains open to all organizations and individuals. End-users and system integrators are invited to join OASIS to participate in the adoption phase of this international standardization effort. OASIS hosts an open mail list for public comment and the ws-reliability-dev mailing list for exchanging information on implementing the standard. WS-Reliability was created by a royalty-free process technical committee within OASIS.