A group of vendors, consisting of Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Oracle, Sonic and Sun Microsystems, published a Web Services Reliability (WS-Reliability) specification working draft aimed at providing more reliable transport for Web services. WS-Reliability is a specification for open, reliable Web services messaging - including guaranteed delivery, duplicate message elimination and message ordering - enabling reliable communication between Web services. The reliability features are based on extensions to the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), rather than being tied to the underlying transport protocol. The specification will allow a variety of systems to interoperate reliably in a platform- and vendor-neutral manner. Following collaboration on the specification draft, the companies plan to submit WS-Reliability to a standards body on a royalty-free basis. The draft specification is online.http://xml.fujitsu.com/en/about/ws_r.html
- SOAP is a lightweight protocol developed through the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) for exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It is based on XML. http://www.w3.org
