Chapter 10. Reliable Messaging

Since the early 1990s, the information technology (IT) community has leveraged reliable messaging as a means of mitigating the issues presented in the scenarios and the motivations covered in this chapter. The IT community has been using message queue technologies such as WebSphereMQ from IBM, SonicMQ from Sonic, and MSMQ from Microsoft, in addition to reliable publish/subscribe technologies such as Tibco Rendezvous. The Java Community Process (JCP) has developed the Java Message Service API (JMS) in an effort to unify the myriad application programming interfaces (APIs) to these proprietary environments for the Java platform. These entities have adapted many of these reliable messaging environments for use in a Web services context by enabling them to carry SOAP messages and by describing their bindings using Web Services Description Language (WSDL). However, to date, each vendor tends to exploit its own proprietary protocol for the transmission of the message between its source and its destination. It's only possible to achieve interoperability between these proprietary messaging environments by means of gateways between disparate environments, each tailored to a specific pair of environments.

With the emergence of Web services as the preferred integration solution for distributed systems, it is now realistic to think about the possibility of a unified interoperability standard for reliable messaging.

WS-Reliable Messaging has the greatest potential for becoming the standard for reliable messaging for Web services. Therefore, this book focuses on that specification.