Sun, Oracle, Fujitsu to push Web services reliability spec

by Paul Krill

Excerpted from InfoWorld – January 9, 2003

---

Setting the stage for another potential battle over Web services standardization, Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu, and Oracle on Tuesday plan to announce a specification for Web services reliability without participation from rivals IBM and Microsoft.

The Web Services Reliability (WS-Reliability) specification is intended to help accelerate adoption of Web services by promoting linking of applications via standard interfaces. WS-Reliability features extensions of SOAP that are intended to provide for guaranteed Web services delivery, eliminate message duplication, and provide for message ordering.

"We believe that this specification removes one of the two major adoption barriers that exist today for Web services, those barriers being a lack of security and the lack of a reliable messaging model," said Ed Julson, group marketing manager for Java and Web services at Sun, in Santa Clara, Calif.

WS-Reliability provides for quality of service for Web services at the application level rather than at the transport level, said Tom Rutt, a Fujitsu consulting engineer based in Asbury Park, N.J.

An analyst applauded WS-Reliability but added it may compete with an alternate proposal by IBM, dubbed HTTPR. IBM and Microsoft have not been invited to participate in WS-Reliability development thus far, but will be able to do so when the proposal is submitted to a standards body shortly, according to Julson and Rutt.

"It's a specification that's in an area of much need for Web services," said analyst Dwight Davis, vice president of Summit Strategies, in Kirkland, Wash. " Web services are nice in theory but not very good in practice unless you can assure that the messages are actually getting through when you send them," Davis said.

But the lack of participation of IBM and Microsoft in WS-Reliability could be a hindrance to adoption and set up another competitive scenario, he acknowledged.

Read the full article in InfoWorld