Oracle and Sun will announce WS-Reliability for guaranteed delivery of messages, ordering of messages, and for the elimination of duplicated messages. WS-Reliability uses a set of extensions written in Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).

Joining Oracle and Sun are Fujitsu Ltd, Hitachi Ltd, NEC Corp and Sonic Software Corp.

Missing from the roll-call, though, is IBM – a company renowned in the field of reliable messaging with middleware such as MQ-Series.

IBM, with partner Microsoft, has also been instrumental in proposing a raft of web services standards and published its own WS- roadmap last April.

IBM appears to have been excluded because of its stance on intellectual property (IP). WS-Reliability will be offered on a Royalty Free (RF) basis Sun and Oracle said, meaning technologies the companies donate to the proposed specification are offered without charge.

IBM, though, has taken an ad-hoc stance on its intellectual property when it comes to web services standards. While offering its technologies for free in ebXML and Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) the company is retaining the right to charge on a case-by-case basis.

Ed Julson, Sun group marketing manager for industry initiatives and standards, said IBM would be invited to join if it supports RF.

The philosophy of the six companies [involved] leans towards open specifications and IP that is submitted on an RF basis. Both are positions that… IBM has not embraced, Julson said. IBM was unavailable for comment. An Oracle spokesperson said IBM is welcome to participate in WS-Reliability development, once the specification is submitted to a standards body. Oracle, Sun and others are in talks to decide which standards body WS-Reliability should be submitted to.

Jeff Mischkinsky, director of web services standards, said the companies had focussed on reliable messaging with WS-Reliability because this was an area that has been largely overlooked in much of the current web services standards work.

Security and reliability are the two biggest barriers [to web services use] right now. There’s on-going work on security standards, but not on reliability, Mischkinsky said.

Source: Computerwire