Microsoft plans Web services spec meeting

Microsoft on Tuesday at its Redmond, Wash., campus plans to hold a summit meeting to seek input on the Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-ReliableMessaging) specification for Web services-based integration, according to sources familiar with Microsoft's plans.

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An official at Sonic Software on Friday, at the Burton Group Catalyst conference in San Francisco, said his company would be attending the invitation-only summit.

"It's a workshop to validate [and] talk about what they're doing," said David Chappell, vice president and chief technology evangelist at Sonic Software.

A Microsoft representative, contacted afterward, was unaware of the meeting, however. But messages pertaining to the meeting are circulating on the Web site of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

Microsoft and co-developers IBM, Tibco, and BEA Systems in March announced publication of WS-ReliableMessaging. It provides a protocol whereby Web services messages that are un-received or are duplicates can be detected, while messages that are received can be processed in the order in which they were sent. The specification has yet to be submitted to an industrywide standards organization, such as OASIS or the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which have been reviewing a wide array of Web services-related proposals.

Sun Microsystems, for one, has been critical of IBM and Microsoft for what Sun claims have been attempts to promote in-house specifications as industry standards without going to a standards body. OASIS, for its part, has even formed a technical committee around the issue of reliable messaging for Web services.

The issue was brought up again during a panel session at the Catalyst conference on Friday, when Microsoft and IBM officials were asked why they have not submitted the proposal to a standards body. But the officials defended their stance.

"We have a process we go though. In that particular specification, we're currently getting feedback, and at the right time we'll make it happen," said Angel Luis Diaz, manager of Web services product management at IBM. No decision has been made on which standards body would receive the specification for consideration as an industry standard, Diaz said.