International standards body OASIS announced that it has approved WS-Reliability as an OASIS standard, which signifies the highest level of ratification. WS-Reliability provides a method to guarantee message delivery over the Internet, enabling companies to conduct reliable business-to-business interactions using Web services.

WS-Reliability was originally submitted in March 2003 by Fujitsu, Hitachi, Oracle, NEC, Sonic Software, and Sun Microsystems. IBM and Microsoft were notably absent, since they were working on their own version of a reliable messaging specification with the help of BEA and Tibco. Unlike WS-Reliability, the designers of WS-ReliableMessaging have chosen to work on the specification outside a standards body like OASIS or the W3C.

WS-Reliability is a Web services specification designed to provide open, reliable Web services messaging. This includes guaranteed delivery, duplicate message elimination and message delivery ordering. Guaranteed delivery ensures that a message is delivered at least once; duplicate message elimination ensures that a message is delivered at most once; and message delivery ordering guarantees that messages in a sequence are delivered in the order sent. Based on SOAP rather than being tightly coupled with an underlying transport protocol, the specification will allow disparate systems to interact reliably regardless of platform or vendor. WS-Reliability is especially critical for asynchronous messaging.

Given the increasingly mission-critical nature of Web services, WS-Reliability is important for insuring the reliability of Web services-based applications within an enterprise SOA architecture, say it proponents.

"Reliable message delivery is one of the key issues to be addressed if there is to be widespread adoption of Web services, particularly in business-to-business scenarios," said Neil Macehiter, research director at Ovum, in a statement. "Communications using Internet-based protocols such as HTTP and SMTP are inherently unreliable and do not support the assured or ordered delivery demanded by the applications on which businesses depend. WS-Reliability, being an approved OASIS standard developed in open forum that addresses these limitations, is an important step on the path to realizing the promise of Web services."