Sun Backs New Web Services Reliability Spec

Sun, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Oracle and Sonic Software have co-authored and published the Web Services Reliability (WS-Reliability) spec, which provides a standard way to ensure that Web services messages are reliable by guaranteeing delivery, eliminating any duplicate messages and defining the correct order of messages.

WS-Reliability includes SOAP extensions that are not tied to underlying transport protocols, which will promote interoperability no matter what platform a company is using, according to a press statement.

The working draft of WS-Reliability is available on the Web site of each co-authoring vendor.

Absent from the list of vendors participating in WS-Reliability are Web services heavyweights Microsoft and IBM, who have joined forces to lead myriad standards efforts.

Microsoft and IBM, in conjunction with other vendors, have spearheaded efforts to standardize UDDI, Web Services Inspection and a host of specs surrounding Web services security, such as WS-Security, WS-Policy, WS-PolicyAttachment, WS-PolicyAssertions, WS-Trust, WS-Secure-Conversation and WS-SecurityPolicy. The companies' lack of participation in the new standards effort could signal that despite the stated intent of leading industry vendors, there is still fragmentation among them concerning which Web services standards should be adopted, observers said.