November 22, 2004

Joseph Chiusano, Associate with Booz Allen Hamilton, provides an overview of the newly released OASIS Web Services Reliability (WS-Reliability) standard and discusses the criticality of Web Services reliability for service-oriented architectures.

Since the introduction of core Web Services specifications such as SOAP and WSDL, there has been an increasing need for organizations to utilize Web Services beyond point-to-point scenarios, for interactions across organizational boundaries and for mission-critical applications.

One of the primary concerns about using Web Services in this manner up to now has been lack of reliability – that is, a lack of certainty that a message could be sent via Web Services and reach its intended destination without being dropped along the way (sometimes unbeknownst to the sender), or without being sent in the incorrect order relative to other messages.

Given the ever-increasing adoption of service-oriented architectures that span organizational boundaries, the need for such reliability is more critical than ever.

Over the past several years, we have seen the introduction of various message queuing vendor products that provide this capability for Web Services; however, reliance on a proprietary vendor product rather than one that leverages an open standard can lead to “vendor lock-in” and an inability to switch vendor products as necessary without an undue cost.

This situation is about to change with the release of the OASIS Web Services Reliability (WS-Reliability) standard, which was approved on 15 November. In this article, we will provide an overview of WS-Reliability.

Web Services Reliability

OASIS Web Services Reliability (also known as “WS-Reliability”) is a SOAP-based standard that fulfills reliable messaging requirements critical to some applications of Web Services, with features such as guaranteed message delivery, duplicate elimination of messages, and guaranteed message ordering.

In terms of a protocol stack, WS-Reliability gives the application layer a mechanism for sending and receiving messages reliably.

In considering why a standard such as WS-Reliability is needed, we should first consider the HTTP protocol and its inherent inability to transport information in a fully reliably manner.

HTTP is not by itself a fully reliable protocol – that is, its reliability is limited to a per-message basis.

HTTP gets this reliability from the underlying transport protocol on top of which it most often operates, TCP/IP.

Additionally, the SOAP protocol does not natively incorporate such reliability features, as it was never intended to be more than a simple, lightweight messaging framework into which such extensions as reliability and security (and others) could be incorporated.

Without such extensions, this all amounts to a lack of robust reliability for SOAP-based Web Services that utilize an HTTP binding.

Why Reliable Messaging is Necessary

Why is reliable messaging necessary for Web Services? Consider a service-oriented architecture in which a business connects with each of its suppliers via Web Services, where the business sends purchase orders to its suppliers on a regular basis and receives shipments of goods with invoices.

In this scenario, if a purchase order were lost in transmission, and there were no reliable way for the business to know about it, it might not realize it until it is too late – in which case it can affect the business’ bottom line due to the goods not being received on time and the business not being able to carry out its day-to-day operations in the best way possible.

This is clearly a case in which the transfer of information between the business and its suppliers via Web Services is mission critical. Consequently, such reliability is critical to the operations and the revenue stream of the business.

Source: Web Services.org

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