The WS-Reliability specification was accepted as a standard by the OASIS Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards in mid-November, and is designed to guarantee message delivery over the internet, enabling businesses to conduct reliable business-to-business trading or collaboration using web services technologies.

The specification was driven by Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC, along with Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Progress’s Sonic Software, while the Japanese vendors have also teamed up on the Reliable Messaging for Grid Service (RM4GS) implementation.

RM4GS was developed by the three companies under the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry’s Business Grid Computing Project to bring grid computing to the business sector. It is available now for download from the Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan under an open source license.