SETTING THE STAGE for another potential battle over Web services standardization, Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu, and Oracle
on Tuesday plan to announce a specification for Web services reliability without participation from rivals IBM and Microsoft.
The Web Services Reliability (WS-Reliability) specification is intended to help accelerate adoption of Web services by promoting
linking of applications via standard interfaces. WS-Reliability features extensions of SOAP that are intended to provide for
guaranteed Web services delivery, eliminate message duplication, and provide for message ordering.
"We believe that this specification removes one of the two major adoption barriers that exist today for Web services, those
barriers being a lack of security and the lack of a reliable messaging model," said Ed Julson, group marketing manager for
Java and Web services at Sun, in Santa Clara, Calif.
WS-Reliability provides for quality of service for Web services at the application level rather than at the transport level,
said Tom Rutt, a Fujitsu consulting engineer based in Asbury Park, N.J.
An analyst applauded WS-Reliability but added it may compete with an alternate proposal by IBM, dubbed HTTPR. IBM and Microsoft
have not been invited to participate in WS-Reliability development thus far, but will be able to do so when the proposal is
submitted to a standards body shortly, according to Julson and Rutt.
"It's a specification that's in an area of much need for Web services," said analyst Dwight Davis, vice president of Summit
Strategies, in Kirkland, Wash. "Web services are nice in theory but not very good in practice unless you can assure that the
messages are actually getting through when you send them," Davis said.
But the lack of participation of IBM and Microsoft in WS-Reliability could be a hindrance to adoption and set up another
competitive scenario, he acknowledged.
"That's always a possibility [when] the two big heavyweights of Web services aren't participating at this point," Davis
said. IBM and Microsoft thus far have set the agenda in Web services specifications, ranging from establishing the core foundations
of SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL and moving into higher-level specifications such as WS-Security, he said.
"If [WS-Reliability] proves to be a well-designed specification, I would hope that Microsoft and IBM would lend their support
to it," Davis said. "There's been plenty of movement the other way, with IBM and Microsoft proposing the specifications and
expecting everyone else to rally around [them]," Davis said.
WS-Reliability will be submitted to a standards body on a royalty-free basis, Rutt said. He and Julson would not say which
one but did say it would be one that has been involved in Web services standards development. That would make the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) and OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) the likely candidates.
IBM, Microsoft, and BEA Systems have not been invited to participate in WS-Reliability thus far because of what Julson and
Rutt termed differences of philosophies on royalty-free specifications and commitment to open standards. They cited the current
IBM-Microsoft-BEA proposal for choreographing interactions between Web services, dubbed Business Process Execution Language
for Web Services (BPEL4WS), which has yet to be submitted to a standards body. IBM and BEA have committed to a royalty-free
stance on BPEL4WS, however.
The BPEL4WS proposal was announced in August 2002, shortly after the unveiling of Sun's own choreography proposal, Web Services
Choreography Interface (WSCI), which has been submitted to the W3C.
Microsoft declined to comment on WS-Reliability on Wednesday, as did BEA. IBM could not be reached for comment.
In another incident demonstrating division in Web services standardization, Microsoft, IBM and BEA last February formed
the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), minus Sun. Sun since has announced its participation.
Other participants in the WS-Reliability effort include Hitachi, NEC and Sonic Software.
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