Reliable Messaging Technology

Reliable Messaging is a Quality of Service (QoS) technology for building more reliable web services. Reliability is measured by a system’s ability to deliver messages from point A to point B without error. The primary purpose of Reliable Messaging is to ensure the delivery of application messages to web service endpoints.

The reliable messaging technology ensures that messages in a given message sequence are delivered at least once and not more than once and optionally in the correct order. When messages in a given sequence are lost in transit or delivered out of order, this technology enables systems to recover from such failures. If a message is lost in transit, the sending system retransmits the message until its receipt is acknowledged by the receiving system. If messages are received out of order, the receiving system may re-order the messages into the correct order.

The Reliable Messaging technology can also be used to implement session management. A unique message sequence is created for each client-side proxy, and the lifetime of the sequence identifier coincides with the lifetime of the proxy. Therefore, each message sequence can be viewed as a session and can be used to implement session management.

You should consider using reliable messaging if the web service is experiencing the following types of problems:

• Communication failures are occurring that result in the network being unavailable or connections being dropped

• Application messages are being lost in transit

• Application messages are arriving at their destination out of order and ordered delivery is a requirement

To help decide whether or not to use reliable messaging, weigh the following advantages and disadvantages:

• Enabling reliable messaging ensures that messages are delivered exactly once from the source to the destination and, if the ordered-delivery option is enabled, ensures that messages are delivered in order.

• Enabling reliable messaging causes a degradation of web service performance, especially if the ordered delivery option is enabled.

• Non-reliable messaging clients cannot interoperate with web services that have reliable messaging enabled.

For instructions on how to use the Reliable Messaging technology, see Chapter 6, Using Reliable Messaging.