Standards consortium OASIS announced the formation of the Web Services Reliable Exchange (WS-RX) Technical Committee on Tuesday, saying it will broaden development of the specifications that comprise both protocol and policy assertions for reliable message exchange.
OASIS said the authors of the WS-ReliableMessaging v1.0 and WS-RM Policy v1.0 specifications, BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, and Tibco, plan to submit their work to the OASIS WS-RX Technical Committee at its first meeting. Changes to these documents, as well as other contributions, will be considered and evaluated based on technical merit, business requirements of users, and the Committee’s charter, OASIS said.
The standards consortium said that to date over 25 organizations have joined the WS-RX Technical Committee, and it’s still accepting participants. Existing members include Actional, Adobe, BEA Systems, DataPower, Entrust, Hitachi, IBM, Iona, Microsoft, NEC, Novell, Oracle, Reactivity, SAP, SeeBeyond, Sonic Software, Sun Microsystems, Systinet, Tibco and webMethods.
But the news comes the week of something of an impasse regarding the development of WS- web services specifications was reached at a debate at the Digital ID World conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. There, a heated debate boiled down to attendees asking Microsoft and IBM to develop their WS- specs in the open, where any interested vendor might contribute, and Microsoft and IBM declining, saying such processes are not suitable.
Iona, meanwhile, yesterday said that WS-RM is intended to provide a standard method for ensuring that a message delivered between disparate systems and applications reaches the intended destination reliably.
The ability to reliably exchange messages between different services and applications, independent of vendor, platform or protocol, is a key requirement for the mainstream adoption of Web services for enterprise computing initiatives, including SOA, explained Eric Newcomer, Iona CTO.
With WS-RM submitted to OASIS, and a new technical committee formed to progress the specification, the industry has taken a significant step toward standardization of this important technology, Newcomer added.
Iona said it already supports a subset of the WS-RM specification in its Mobile Orchestrator mobile middleware product, and that it intends to support the full specification in forthcoming versions of its Artix Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
