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IT Titans to Submit WS-RM Spec to OASIS for Standardization

By Dilip Thomas

BEA Systems, IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp, and TIBCO Software Inc. will submit the latest version of the Web Services ReliableMessaging (WS-RM) specification, comprising both protocol and
policy assertions, to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for further refinement and finalization as a Web services standard. Incorporating broad industry feedback, the co-authors proposed a technical committee and charter to enable further review and industry collaboration on the proposed standard.

WS-RM has received extensive industry support and interoperability with a number of implementations beyond the authoring companies as a result of a series of feedback and interoperability workshops, with the most recent workshop having been held April 13-14, 2005. In addition to the co-authors, a wide range of companies and organizations, including Actional, Adobe, Arjuna, Blue Titan, Choreology, Ericsson, IONA, OAGi, Reactivity, Sonic, Sun Microsystems, Systinet, webMethods, the U.K. government, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have expressed support for the launch of this effort in OASIS.

Reliable message-based communication can be a vital element to enterprise-critical applications. Reliable messaging includes the ability to ensure that a message exchange has been completed correctly with no messages lost or duplicated. For example, within an order processing system, it is critical for the application to know that all items have been received and none have been duplicated. If a client using this application temporarily loses network connectivity during the course of order submission, reliable messaging ensures that the order is received once and only once. In some applications, it can also be important to know the correct sequencing of messages. The WS-RM protocol, together with the other Web services specifications such as those related to security, policy, transactions and
coordination, can help provide a more secure, robust and scalable approach to reliable messaging.

The co-authors are committed to the development of open industry standards to help drive widespread adoption of Web services and will not charge royalties in conjunction with WS-RM. The co-authors are looking forward to future collaboration in helping to bring together a more cohesive and composable Web services architecture.


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