Reliable Web Services

Reliable Web Services

While I agree to Jon Udell's posting Reliable Web Services that web services will converse in a loosely coupled asynchronous manner. I do disagree that this requires message orientated middleware to happen. Reliable message delivery is a function of the protocol among the nodes not the transport, i.e., you can build reliable messaging using UDP Tibco/Rendezvous or over HTTPR, I have even seen JMS over HTTP. Therefore to make SOAP more reliable it is more around defining the semantics of the interaction rather than the protocol that SOAP is bound to. This is similar to JMS, which is an interface rather than a protocol and the messaging semantics are defined at an abstract level allowing the implementers to use any appropriate transport.

It is going to be interesting to see if web services develop in to a rich set of XML standards for messaging or does it become relagated to being a hitchhiker on a reliable transport.